New Museum’s Show Honors the Vision of Okwui Enwezor
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.
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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.)
Courtesy of: artnet news
