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Blue. Blood. Bruise. The three phrases that comprise Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture, A Small Band (2015), are at present emblazoned on the Bowery façade of New York’s New Museum. Positioned on the threshold to a brand new exhibition entitled ‘Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America’, they function a reminder of how far we haven’t are available addressing America’s racial injustice.
The phrases in Ligon’s sculpture had been initially uttered by Daniel Hamm, a younger Black teenager arrested in Harlem in 1964 together with his pal Wallace Baker, for a criminal offense they didn’t commit. The younger males, each 18 on the time, had been crushed by police with such drive, they had been taken to hospital for X-rays. The officers refused remedy to the lads, as they weren’t visibly bleeding. In response, Hamm reached to indicate them a bruise on his leg. ‘I needed to open the bruise up, and let a few of the bruise blood come out to indicate them,’ he mentioned.
This bruise blood is on the beating coronary heart of ‘Grief and Grievance’, an exhibition which explores trauma and mourning within the African American expertise and its intersection with white nationalist violence. Bringing collectively works from 37 artists, together with Mark Bradford, Lorna Simpson, Rashid Johnson, Deana Lawson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Theaster Gates, Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall, the exhibition explores how artists have grappled with the experiences of mourning, remembrance and political motion in works from the Nineteen Sixties to the current day.
‘Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America’, 2021. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Picture: Dario Lasagni
Initially conceived in 2018 by Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition additionally serves as a tribute to the imaginative and prescient and work of this esteemed curator, who sadly handed away from most cancers in March 2019. On the time, Enwezor wished the exhibition opening to coincide with the American presidential election of 2020. He couldn’t have anticipated the urgency and poignancy of the context inside which it’s now displayed.
In Enwezor’s reminiscence, the New Museum’s inventive director Massimiliano Gioni labored on bringing the exhibition to life alongside Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator on the Guggenheim Museum, and artists Glenn Ligon and Mark Nash.
Right here, we converse with Gioni about Enwezor’s lasting legacy and the advanced narrative and views on grief supplied by the artworks within the present.
Wallpaper*: What was your expertise of engaged on the curation of the exhibition with Okwui Enwezor?
Massimiliano Gioni: In 2018 Okwui Enwezor was contributing to 2 catalogues for 2 solo exhibitions on the New Museum: with John Akomfrah and Nari Ward, artists he had identified and labored with for the reason that Nineties. So we had been talking extra regularly, and that’s when he advised me about this cycle of lectures he was making ready for Harvard, titled ‘Grief and Grievance: Artwork and Mourning in America’.
The concepts he was working round had been so compelling and so related for artwork and tradition at giant in America in 2018, that I requested if he’d contemplate growing them into an exhibition, an invite he took on with the passion and the power that at all times distinguished him. From the autumn of 2018 till March 2019, he labored on the present.
To begin with, he insisted that his present open within the fall of 2020, simply earlier than the US presidential election. He noticed this present as a political and private mission and one with which he would confront the racist and white nationalist insurance policies of Trump.
Deanna Lawson, Jouvert, Flatbush, Brooklyn, 2013. Pigment print, 40 x 49 ¾ in (101.6 x 126.4 cm). © Deana Lawson. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
He was already in hospital for a part of the preparation of the present, although he at all times stored working and planning and discussing concepts. In January 2019, he advised me he wished to ask Glenn Ligon to be an advisor on the exhibition. And after Okwui’s passing in March that yr, I learnt he had additionally began talking with many artists.
All this to say that so long as Okwui was alive, my position was actually simply that of a facilitator, and I used to be simply making an attempt to assist him: the exhibition is actually very a lot his personal, even when we needed to full it after his passing with Glenn, Naomi, and Mark serving as advisors. Probably the most instructive expertise of being in dialogue with Okwui round this present was simply seeing him so devoted to this mission, till the very finish. He stored texting and writing and calling on the telephone and planning: that was actually extremely outstanding and beneficiant of him.
Theaster Gates, Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr, 2014. Video, sound, color; 6:31 minutes. © Theaster Gates. Courtesy White Dice and Regen Tasks, Los Angeles
W*: How did his dedication to bringing this mission to life impression the group in going ahead with the exhibition?
MG: After Okwui’s passing, everyone I spoke with agreed that the exhibition was very pricey to him and that we would have liked to see it by means of. He had left us with loads of supplies, notes, and choices that may enable us to finish it in a fashion devoted to his authentic imaginative and prescient (after all, he would have in all probability made it totally different and possibly higher).
With Glenn, we mentioned inviting a small group of advisors that may comply with Okwui’s choices very rigorously and respect his method to exhibition making, whereas often decoding his concepts inside the framework of his curatorial methodology. Mark had identified and collaborated with him for the reason that Nineties and had been a co-curator on Okwui’s ‘The Quick Century’ and ‘Documenta 11’, so he knew his work very intimately. Naomi, then again, is a youthful curator, however Okwui had chosen her to be within the jury for his Venice Biennale. So Glenn, Naomi, Mark and I had totally different views on Okwui’s work, from throughout totally different a long time and totally different approaches.
Set up view of Nari Ward, Peace Keeper, 1995. Hearse, grease, mufflers, and feathers, 144 x 116 x 264 in (365.8 x 294.6 x 670.6 cm). Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul, and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, and Havana. Picture: Dario Lasagni
W*: Enwezor conceived of the exhibition throughout a time of heightened racial rigidity in America, which has escalated since he handed away, with the killing of George Floyd, the following protests within the US and all over the world – and the current occasions in Washington, DC. Do the works tackle a brand new significance now?
MG: We had completed the exhibition catalogue and just about the collection of all of the works by 1 Might 2020 (the present was meant to open in October 2020). George Floyd was killed on 25 Might. Because the protests and the demonstrations began build up, we mentioned whether or not we would have liked to alter something within the catalogue (which had already gone to print) or to the exhibition. However the consensus among the many advisors was that the premises of the present nonetheless stood, they usually demonstrated that the problems confronted by the works within the present had been endemic to American tradition for many years. What had modified was maybe their visibility for some members of the general public.
It’s attention-grabbing to now undergo the present and realise that the absence of direct references to the occasions of final summer time doesn’t actually take away from it. It presumably offers the present even a stronger resonance, not solely as a result of it’s a clear indictment of a scenario that had been very pervasive for many years (and that has not been resolved but, clearly), however as a result of it transcends the immediacy of the information to work in larger depth.
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (policeman), 2015. Acrylic on PVC panel with Plexiglas body, 60 x 60 in (152.4 x 152.4 cm). Museum of Trendy Artwork, Present of Mimi Haas in honour of Marie-Josée Kravis. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
W*: What can we study from the exhibition in regards to the methods during which artists have confronted grief from the Nineteen Sixties onwards – are there notable shifts of their modes of expression?
MG: I feel one of many essential questions Okwui was addressing by means of the work within the present was ‘signify’, confront and even perhaps survive trauma and ache and grief, and significantly how to take action in relation to photographs of violence, with out falling into the entice of exploitation, even pornography, with out spectacularising violence. And I feel the work of many artists – ranging from Jack Whitten and Daniel LaRue Johnson within the Nineteen Sixties, and all the way in which to Mark Bradford, Ellen Gallagher, Jennie Jones, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, together with even musicians like Tyshawn Sorey – suggests a rigidity between abstraction and figuration, between sublimation and the documentary or the reportage. That’s maybe finest made obvious in Whitten’s small work Birmingham, 1964, during which a picture of violence (the photograph of a Civil Rights protester in Birmingham in 1963 as he will get attacked by police canines) is roofed with an summary texture made with a nylon gauze and aluminum and paint: the picture is a wound that’s cured and mended with layers of abstraction.
W*: Do the works supply a unique perspective on grief, displaying that it may be a degree of resistance, and of energy?
MG: I feel Okwui was clearly pointing to the truth that mourning may catalyse participation and as such ignite a type of political transformation. In any case, as we’ve been reminded too many occasions this previous summer time, after the killing of George Floyd, the funerary procession resembles an indication. We shouldn’t overlook that Okwui’s first main biennial came about in Johannesburg in 1997: as somebody born in Nigeria, he had seen how funerals had become websites of protests in South Africa throughout apartheid.
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Dying, 2016. Video, sound color; 7:25 min. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
When it comes to the totally different perspective on grief, many works within the present use sound and efficiency and dance, such because the work of Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Rashid Johnson, Kahlil Joseph, Okwui Okpokwasili, Tyshawn Sorey and others. Okwui wished music and efficiency to supply a pulsating presence to a present about mortality.
And this manner he not solely pointed to the custom that sees blues and jazz as a sort of sublimation of ache, however he additionally actually gave life to the exhibition by making it stuffed with sound, of our bodies transferring. In that sense it’s not a defeatist present: it’s not nearly loss and commemoration but in addition very a lot about life. §
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