The New Yorker
by Peter Schjeldahl

A show of leading Black artists at the New Museum powerfully channels emotional tenors that are true to the history—and the future—of race in this country.

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” which recently opened at the New Museum, is a terrific art show. I might have expected that, given a starry roster that includes Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Theaster Gates among its total of thirty-seven contemporary Black artists. But theme exhibitions normally repel me, shoehorning independent talents into curatorial agendas. What a difference in this case! “Grief and Grievance” is a brainchild of the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who, notably with his curation of the German mega-show Documenta, in 2002, and the Venice Biennale, in 2015, pried the international art world open for new art from Africa and Asia. He died of cancer in March, 2019, at the age of fifty-five, while planning the present show. The New Museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, aided by Ligon and the curators Naomi Beckwith and Mark Nash, completed the task, faithful to Enwezor’s conception, emphasizing interiority and the patterns of feeling that attend Black experience in America. There’s grief, which is constant; grievance, which appeals, however futilely, to some or another authority able and willing to right wrongs; and mourning, the fate and recourse of the irreparably wounded. From this description, you might expect a litany of remonstrance. On the contrary, the show celebrates what artists are good at: telling personal truths through aesthetic form. The predominant result is poetic—deeply so—rather than argumentative.

It’s worth noting immediately that there’s little explicit address to white racism, white guilt, or, really, white anything, except by way of inescapable implication. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a devastating essay in the show’s catalogue, fills in the lacuna with his well-known, scorching pessimism about white mind-sets. What Coates would like from whites, though he does not expect it, is “a resistance intolerant of self-exoneration.” The show was originally intended to open in October, amid the furors leading up to the Presidential election. The pandemic scotched that. But “Grief and Grievance” doesn’t have a use-by date. It channels emotional tenors, from personal points of view, that are true to the history, and the future, of race in this country.

[…]

The Chicagoan Kerry James Marshall has become justly famous as a painter who deploys Blackness as a theme and black as a plangent color—hard to do if you’re not a Zurbarán, say, or a Goya. A Black cop seated on the hood of a police car radiates watchfulness. Interiors of middle-class homes feature banal furniture and images of civil-rights-era heroes that either hang on walls, like a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., bracketed by John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, or hover as ghosts. Standing Black matrons include a woman who is equipped with angel wings. Another picture incorporates a list of departed Black luminaries spelled out in glitter. Who told Marshall that you can get away with using glitter in an elegiac painting? It’s one of many audacities that ignite his style. One interior is overlaid with vertical gray stripes and more glitter. Everything works. Marshall brings genres of domestic and history painting spankingly up to date, achieving an aesthetic and sociological sublime. His art both stirs and mocks nostalgia, subjecting sincerity to irony in ways that intensify both.

There’s a piquant backstory to Ligon’s “A Small Band” (2015), which consists of the words “blues blood bruise” displayed in white neon letters high on the front of the museum. In 1964, New York police officers beat two Black teen-agers and then refused them medical attention because they weren’t bleeding. One of the boys, Daniel Hamm, squeezed a bruise that he had incurred, forcing blood out. He explained later, with a slip of the tongue, that he’d “let some of the blues blood come out.” Thus Ligon’s beautiful short poem. “Blues” as a stand-in for “bruise” links Hamm’s ordeal to a classically African-American way of processing sorrow. Your mind spirals down from an anecdote of police brutality to a sense of the inner life, the subjectivity, and the acculturated sensibility of a victim who is not reducible to victimhood. Ligon’s work previews a psychosocial dynamic that abounds in “Grief and Grievance,” which takes consequences of oppression and misfortune—grinding poverty, in the case of photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier—as occasions for tours de force.

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Courtesy of: The New Yorker

artnet news
by Brian Boucher

Curator Naomi Beckwith on How the New Museum’s Show on Black Grief as a ‘State of Being’ Honors the Vision of Okwui Enwezor

The exhibition spans works as far back as the 1960s and takes over the entire New Museum.

“With the media’s normalization of white nationalism,” Okwui Enwezor wrote in 2018, “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.”

Those words come from the late curator’s proposal for the exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” which opens this week at New York’s New Museum (through June 6). In that statement, Enwezor tied a sense of white grievance that arose after the Civil War to the necessity of grieving in Black America, the target of a century and a half of violence.

“Okwui’s framing of the project takes the idea of a political crime and transfers it to the register of psychological impact,” said curator Naomi Beckwith, who worked on the show, in a Zoom conversation with Artnet News. “The show’s title alludes not to a historic event, but rather to a state of being.”

Occupying the entire building, the show has the somber distinction of being among the final projects of the famed curator. Planned to open around the time of the 2020 election, the show was delayed because of the pandemic.

[…]

The roster of artists, curators and scholars involved with the show is richly studded with MacArthur “genius” grantees like Ta-Nehisi Coates, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker, as well as many other giants like Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and Rashid Johnson. The show includes more than three dozen artists and has blockbuster works like Arthur Jafa’s rapturously received 2016 video Love Is the Message, the Message is Death; Johnson’s towering, 28-foot long sculpture Antoine’s Organ (2016); and a few Marshall paintings stretching to as much as 13 feet wide.

Another high-profile inclusion is a Ligon work that Enwezor commissioned for Venice in 2015, which will remain on the museum’s facade for a full year: A Small Band, which proclaims the words “blues blood bruise” in white neon and black paint. Those words are taken from remarks by Daniel Hamm, an innocent young Black man notoriously beaten by New York police in 1964, saying he had to squeeze blood out of a bruise to get the police to let him see a doctor. (Composer Steve Reich’s 1966 Come Out was inspired by the same words.)

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Courtesy of: artnet news

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.

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Courtesy of: New Museum