New Museum
February 17 to June 6, 2021
Get Tickets

An intergenerational exhibition of works from thirty-seven artists, conceived by curator Okwui Enwezor

From February 17 to June 6, 2021, the New Museum will present “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” an exhibition originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) for the New Museum, and presented with curatorial support from advisors Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash. “Grief and Grievance” will be an intergenerational exhibition, bringing together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. The exhibition will further consider the intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance, as each structures and defines contemporary American social and political life. “Grief and Grievance” will comprise works encompassing video, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound, and performance made in the last decade, along with several key historical works and a series of new commissions created in response to the concept of the exhibition.

In 2018, the New Museum invited Okwui Enwezor to organize “Grief and Grievance.” Around that time, Enwezor was also developing a series of public talks for the Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures at Harvard University focused on the intersection of Black mourning and white nationalism in American life as articulated in the work of contemporary Black American artists. The argument put forth in this series–which he unfortunately was unable to deliver–informed the ideas Enwezor would use as the basis for “Grief and Grievance.” Between the fall of 2018 and March 2019, Enwezor tirelessly worked on “Grief and Grievance,” drafting his thesis for the exhibition, compiling lists of artists and artworks, selecting the catalogue contributors, and speaking with many of the invited artists. In January 2019, Enwezor asked the artist Glenn Ligon to serve as an advisor to the exhibition. Given the advanced state of planning and the importance of the exhibition, following Enwezor’s death on March 15, 2019, and with the support of his estate and of many of his friends and collaborators, the New Museum established an advisory team, comprised of longtime collaborators and friends of Enwezor including Glenn Ligon; Mark Nash, Professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and co-curator of many of Enwezor’s projects, including The Short Century and Documenta 11; and Naomi Beckwith, the Manilow Senior Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, whom Enwezor had chosen as one of the jurors of his 2015 Venice Biennale. With the assistance of Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director at the New Museum, this curatorial advisory group worked together to realize and interpret Enwezor’s vision for “Grief and Grievance.” The curatorial advisors and the New Museum also see this exhibition as a tribute to Enwezor’s work and legacy.

---

Since he began work on the project, Enwezor had expressed a desire to open the exhibition in proximity to the American presidential election, as a powerful response to a crisis in American democracy and as a clear indictment of Donald Trump’s racist politics. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed the opening of the exhibition, the works included in the exhibition speak powerfully to America’s past, present, and future.

Enwezor saw “Grief and Grievance” as one of his most personal projects, and one of his most political. Within “Grief and Grievance,” mourning can be seen as a distinct form of politics, one that refuses a singular melancholy in favor of multifaceted forms of critique, resistance, and care. As Enwezor wrote in his initial narrative for the exhibition, “with the media’s normalization of white nationalism, the last two years have made clear that there is a new urgency to assess the role that artists, through works of art, have played to illuminate the searing contours of the American body politic.” In Enwezor’s view, the works in this exhibition help illustrate the idea that mourning is a practice that permeates the social, economic, and emotional realities of Black life in America as it is experienced across the country by multiple generations of individuals, families, and communities.

[…]

Contextualizing the work of contemporary artists within an important legacy of political and aesthetic strategies, which have defined the history of art and representation in America for decades, the exhibition will stand as proof that many of the concerns driving the current debates around race, discrimination, and violence in America have been left unconfronted for far too long. As Enwezor suggested, Black grief has been a national emergency for many years now, and many artists have consistently addressed it in their work.

To respect Enwezor’s wishes for the exhibition to coincide with the 2020 US presidential election, the exhibition catalogue will be released ahead of the exhibition opening, in fall 2020, and includes contributions from Elizabeth Alexander, Naomi Beckwith, Judith Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Saidiya Hartman, Juliet Hooker, Glenn Ligon, Mark Nash, Claudia Rankine, and Christina Sharpe.

The catalogue was designed by Polymode—Silas Munro and Brian Johnson.
Read more about the catalogue and purchase it here.

Read more…

Courtesy of: New Museum

WKBN-27
by Stan Boney

LaToya Ruby Frazier spent nine months documenting the workers and their families

LORDSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) – The front cover of a book recently published by LaToya Ruby Frazier was shot from a helicopter two days after the final vehicle rolled off the assembly line at the General Motors Lordstown plant.

Of the 3,000 photos taken by Frazier on the closing of the plant, one of the last Cruze surrounded by the people who drove it off the line and into the parking lot is among her favorites.

“I’m several thousand feet in the air, hovering above it with a 600 mm lens, hanging out the side of the helicopter,” she said.

Frazier spent nine months documenting the workers and their families.

One photo shows Kesha Scales tearing up while hugging co-worker Beverly Williams. Another is of paint shop worker Vickie Raymond sitting on a bed in her parents’ home. There’s also one of the union women’s committee praying before a meeting.

Frazier is from Pittsburgh and a family of steelworkers.

“As an artist and the stories that I like to tell working class heroes are always the theme, the content and the subject matter that I always collaborate with,” she said.

After the New York Times approved her idea of documenting the shutdown, she arrived at the United Auto Workers’ Union Hall across from the plant.

“Met Dave Green and sat down with President Dave Green at the time of Local 1112 and proposed my idea to work in-depth, intimately with him to tell the story from their perspectives and their children,” Frazier said.

The book is not just of pictures, though. A photo of Pamela Brown comes with a detailed writeup about her, as does that of retiree Louis Robinson, Jr.

Frazier also put together a traveling exhibit that is being displayed at museums all across the country.

“So this will permanently stand as a work of art that is a testament of workers as well as a workers’ monument. We can always learn this history and I think we need it now more than ever,” she said.

There have been efforts to bring the traveling exhibit to Youngstown but so far, there are no plans.

Frazier said she never made it inside the plant — General Motors would not allow her access.

The Last Cruze is 392 pages and weighs six pounds. It costs $50 and can be bought through the Renaissance Society of Chicago.

Read more…

Courtesy of: WKBN-27

“The ongoing expansion and enrichment of the Museum’s contemporary art collection reflects our deep commitment to bringing diversity, inclusivity, and new narratives to the contemporary art collection.”

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) announced today its summer and fall contemporary art acquisitions, which include works by Christina Fernandez, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Edgar Heap of Birds, Kirk Hayes, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Marcelyn McNeil, and Liz Trosper. The artworks, which are wide-ranging in their formal approach, media, and vision, expand SAMA’s growing photography collection and fulfill important mission-driven goals to enhance its holdings of works by women, artists of color, and those living in Texas. The group includes the first two works by contemporary Native American artists to enter SAMA’s collection, furthering its vision to more fully represent the spectrum of voices and perspectives within contemporary art practices. These objects join a group of works purchased earlier in the year by contemporary Latin American artists, including Jose Dávila, Sonia Gomes, Pedro Reyes, and Analia Saban.

“The effort to grow and diversify SAMA’s contemporary art collection is strategically and thoughtfully led by Suzanne Weaver, the Museum’s Interim Chief Curator and The Brown Foundation Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, whose understanding of contemporary artistic practices and long-standing relationships in the art world continue to benefit the Museum exponentially,” said Emily Sano, Co-Interim Director.

[…]

LaToya Ruby Frazier (American, b. 1982)
Shea’s Aunt Denise and Uncle Rodney in their home on Foster Street watching President Barack Obama take a sip of Flint water, 2016–2017
Gelatin silver print; Edition 2/5
30 x 40 inches
© LaToya Ruby Frazier
Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

Flint is Family, 2016
Video (color, sound)
Edition 3/5
11 minutes, 50 seconds
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work examines the confluences of social justice and cultural changes, offering astute commentary on the American experience. Her incisive work, which is informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, includes photographs, videos, and written texts that explore the complicated nature of family, the American healthcare system, industrial pollution, income inequality, race, and many other subjects critical to our national dialogues. The photograph and video entering the Museum’s collection are part of Frazier’s series Flint is Family (2016–2017), which she developed over the course of a five-month period and captures the water crisis in Flint, Michigan and its effects on that community’s residents through intimate and lush imagery. Frazier’s works add an important voice to the Museum’s documentary photography holdings, which include significant works by such artists as Walker Evans, Leonard Freed, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Danny Lyon, and W. Eugene Smith, among others. The work was purchased with funds from the Brown Foundation Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund.

Read more…

Courtesy of: San Antonio Museum of Art