Browse through the works of 37 Black artists while walking around the “Grief and Grievance” exhibit.
“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” a new exhibition that has taken over almost the entirety of the New Museum and is set to stay put until June 6, explores the history of racist violence all throughout the United States.
Back in 2018, curator Okwui Enwezor began working on the project, hoping to mount it by last year’s Presidential election. Unfortunately, the curator’s passing in 2019 and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift in plans that delayed the show’s opening to last week.
In total, the work of 37 Black artists currently fills the museum’s lobby, its three main viewing floors, the building’s exterior and the South Gallery found in the building next door.
Expect to browse through the amazing works of artists the likes of Kara Walker, who is the brain behind an entire wall filled with sketches and drawings; LaToya Ruby Frazier, who contributes over a dozen photographs from her “The Notion of Family” series; and Jean-Michael Basquiat, whose “Procession” can be glanced at as soon as the elevator doors open on the third floor.
The show is a powerful one, with images ranging in style, theme and scope, but one that is necessary to delve into today more than ever. Given COVID-19-related guidelines, visitors have to purchase timed tickets ahead of their trip.
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We have heard the phrase “grim milestone” so often in the past year that it now falls into the realm of journalistic cliché.
Monday’s news that the US has surpassed half a million Covid-19 deaths should not, however, be any less poignant for its morbid familiarity.
These are the moments in which individual and shared grief intersect. But as we struggle to take stock of societies’ losses, what does coming to terms with grief, as a culture, really look like?
Whether portraying others’ grief or revealing their own, artists are often able tap into something universal. One need not be Christian to feel Mary’s anguish in Renaissance depictions of Christ’s crucifixion; one need not have lived through the Spanish Civil War to feel the harrowing abyss at the heart of Picasso’s “Guernica” (pictured above). The torment of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is clear to all.
The New Museum in New York City explores this idea of processing grief through art with painfully appropriate timing. Just days before Monday’s Covid-19 milestone, it opened the new exhibition, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.” In another cruel twist, the show’s mastermind, Nigerian curator and critic Okwui Enwezor, died before its opening following a long battle with cancer.
The show was, however, conceived before the emergence of Covid-19. (Enwezor passed away in 2019, though he might well have predicted how a pandemic would disproportionately affect people of color.) It instead addresses racial injustice and, in the late curator’s words, “black grief in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance.”
LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Professional Building Doctors’ Offices from the series The Grey Area (2010–2012)
In the exhibition, memorial and commemoration take many forms. In “Peace Keeper,” Jamaican artist Nari Ward covered a full-size hearse in tar and feathers. Rashid Johnson’s living installation, “Antoine’s Organ,” meanwhile presents plants and various household items (including shea butter and books chronicling the experiences of the African diaspora) in a commentary on the nature of life and decay. Elsewhere, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of working-class hardship and Julie Mehretu’s abstract landscape paintings all struggle with loss in their own unique ways.
These varied responses to the show’s central premise — that grief is irrevocably woven through the Black experience in America — are both personal and, by virtue of their exhibition, inherently public. Artistic creation is often an act of both private catharsis and solidarity.
Audiences interpret the creators’ grief through the lens of their own, and thus individual suffering is communicated to society as a whole. Culture may not cure, but it can soothe.
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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.
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LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Professional Building Doctors’ Offices from the series The Grey Area (2010–2012)
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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Curator Okwui Enwezor originally conceived “Grief and Grievance” in 2018, in the aftermath of a period that saw the nation’s first Black president, the death of Trayvon Martin, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of nine members of an African American congregation by a young white supremacist.
NEW YORK — The most ambitious exhibitions help to usher in new ways of seeing. The Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who died in March 2019 at just 55, specialized in these kinds of paradigm-shifting shows.
His exhibitions had a prescient feeling. If you saw them or even read about them, you knew you were seeing the shape of future conversations about art — and about who gets kudos for making it.
“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” — the last show organized by Enwezor and his only one devoted exclusively to art by African Americans — feels retrospective rather than prescient. That makes sense, because the show, at the New Museum in New York, is about mourning, commemoration and loss.
Remarkable in its quality, emotional force and concision, it features work by many of this country’s most acclaimed Black artists — among them Carrie Mae Weems, Mark Bradford, Lorna Simpson, Kerry James Marshall, Theaster Gates and Kara Walker.
—Giorgio Zucchiatti/Courtesy Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia
Enwezor originally conceived “Grief and Grievance” in 2018, in the aftermath of a period that saw America’s first Black president, the death of Trayvon Martin, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of nine members of an African-American congregation by a young white supremacist. After Donald Trump became president, Enwezor wanted to think through what he called the “crystallization of Black grief in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance.”
He has done that and, at the same time, produced a show that is filled with musical invention, austere forms of abstract beauty and visceral expressions of joy.
Enwezor planned for the show to open during Trump’s first term. In case his cancer progressed, he had entrusted aspects of the project to the artist Glenn Ligon, who worked with curators Mark Nash, Naomi Beckwith and Massimiliano Gioni to bring the show to fruition. The catalogue was completed May 1, 2020, less than a month before the killing of George Floyd. The opening was then set back by the pandemic.
Trump is no longer president, and in 2021, many people — buffeted by so many crises on so many fronts — might not want to be reminded of the concatenation of traumas to which the art in the show responds. I don’t blame them. But the exhibition is polyphonic, layered and, in many ways, I think, cathartic. Beckwith told me last fall that she envisaged the show as “a form of collective therapy.”
The show’s cathartic potential is linked to its visceral immediacy: much of the art is either robustly made (Bradford, Nari Ward, Kevin Beasley) or plugged into the emotional directness of music (Arthur Jafa, Tyshawn Sorey, Kahlil Joseph). Its aura of hard-won wisdom emerges from the work of artists who take a long view, engaging with the civil rights era (Weems, Marshall, Dawoud Bey) or pulling us into more personal histories (LaToya Ruby Frazier, Howardena Pindell).
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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.
Okwui Enwezor in 2015. Photograph: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
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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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In a new exhibition, the work of 37 artists has been brought together to show how art can react to the epidemic of violence towards black Americans
At a time when black Americans are twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as their white counterparts while a reckoning continues over ongoing police brutality, a new group exhibition is opening to tell the story of black grief in America, from the 1960s to present day.
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America opens 17 February at the New Museum in New York City, featuring 37 artists whose work ties into loss linked to racial violence – including artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
The exhibition was first conceived by the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019 at the age of 55, after a career of championing black artists. “Okwui conceived this exhibition before the killing of George Floyd,” said the New Museum artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni. “The situation was unbearable long before that. He made a statement before others, but he was clear-eyed and saw what was happening in America for a long time.”
Gioni is co-curating the exhibition in his memory alongside Naomi Beckwith, the newly appointed deputy director of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as artists Glenn Ligon and Mark Nash.
Okwui Enwezor in 2015. Photograph: WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
It all started in 2018 when Enwezor began to organize in relation to a talk series he was developing at Harvard University around black mourning and white nationalism in America. Enwezor wanted to debut the exhibition around the same time as the 2020 American presidential election, as an outcry for democracy under the Trump administration (it was then pushed back by the pandemic).
It features moments of political action linked with mourning in American history, with artists such as Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Hank Willis Thomas, a painting by Mark Bradford, photos by LaToya Ruby Frazier, a sculpture by Simone Leigh and a video by Arthur Jafa.
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