Text by Sharon Xiaorong Liu
Exhibition Title: “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”
Exhibition Location: New Museum, New York, USA
Exhibition Duration: 02/17/2021 to 06/06/2021
(Installation Photo of Rashid Johnson’s Antoine’s Organ, photography by Sharon Xiaorong Liu)
Grief leads to grievance, in the sense of a petition for justice, whether reparation,
acknowledgement, or punishment, but when the law is the problem, to whom or what does one appeal?[1]
The exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” on view from 02/17/2021 to 06/06/2021 at the New Museum was originally conceived by the Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) and later realized by the New Museum advisory board after Enwezor’s death. The exhibition contains thirty-seven artists’ works in response to the racial violence experienced by the black community in America. The exhibition is a political intervention in response to racial controversy in America and also a milestone for the blooming of African American art. The free-form approach of this exhibition reshapes visitors’ memorialization of black suffering and mourning.
Art critic Simon Wu published an exhibition review on Frieze arguing that the exhibition failed to address the root cause of black grievance.[2] However, for this complex racial issue in America scholars and writers have not reached a consensus. At this point in history, we have not yet arrived at a point where one can easily find a solution to a historical problem. This is not to argue that it is enough for art exhibitions to focus solely on the present and stop considering historical causes or imagining the future. However, the exhibition uses a free-form approach to show that history is with us in this moment. “Grieving and Grievance” is a political intervention that responds to a historical racial issue and promotes African American artworks to influence our memorialization for the coantinuity of the Black culture in America.
The exhibition is a political timing specific exhibition, thus an intervention.[3] The exhibition was conceived in 2018 in the chaos of racial conflicts unleashed by Donald Trump, the 46th president of the United States. Enwezor hoped the exhibition could come out before the 2020 US presidential election as a response to Trump’s racial politics.[4] The catalogue did come out earlier in 2020 than the exhibition to make a statement. Enwezor also mentioned in his introductory essay that, “recent 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.”[5] Although the exhibition wasn’t realized until Spring 2021, the show served as another stimulant that disrupted and challenged visitors’ perceptions of African American culture, countering the rise of white supremacy.
The exhibition is not just a timely intervention. The scale of the exhibition—37 artists’ works—reminds visitors of a maturing African American artistic style. The issue of black mourning is not a sudden occurrence, and there have always been artworks responding to racial inequality ever since the abolishment of slavery after the US civil war, such as the Black Aesthetic Movement that emphasized racial pride in the 60s and 70s.[6] Yet, an exhibition that surveys Black expression of mourning has never been seen before. The collection of these artworks signals something similar to the opening of the National Museum of African American History—African American art is claiming a central position in the world of American contemporary art.
In this show, the narrative is not chronological, linear, or thematic in any way, but amasses different mediums and condenses the historical timeline to enhance an association between African American art of all time periods and our lives. For example, in Rashid Johnson’s Antoine’s Organ, a selection of books from the African diaspora, Johnson’s previous video works centering on African Americans, live plants, and bags of shea butter are displayed on a massive scaffolding. In the center of the installation, a pianist, while performing, would suddenly slam the piano without warning. The shocking slamming sound resembles the sound of a gunshot. Visitors would connect this sound with numerous racist police killings of African Americans in recent and not-so-recent history. All of these elements together provide a multi-sensuous African American experience that exists outside of any historical context. Although this exhibition includes three works responding to historical incidents such as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Procession, the curating group did not choose to highlight the historical background. Instead, these works are presented together with Mark Bradford’s Untitled (2020) and Julie Mehretu’s See Gold, Cry Black (2019), both of which use the language of abstraction such as bold brushstrokes and contrasting color palettes to confront historical moments of violence. Embedded in the artworks of the exhibition are certain combinations of iconographies, distinctive color palettes, and music that form into a set of vocabulary highlighting Black cultural autonomy.
If we take a step back and place this exhibition in the history of New York or America, we can better understand the exhibition intended to advocate the awareness of a blooming black art style. At the same time when this exhibition was taking place, other art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art were also putting on solo exhibitions by Julie Mehretu and Dawoud Bay.[7] It seemed that black artists were taking over the museum space in New York. Are these black artists’ shows just a temporary phenomenon thanks to the BLM movement in 2020? Is the true intention behind these exhibitions to take advantage of public attention or to conceal the fact that the dominating power in the art industry is still controlled by white elites? For this exhibition, it was Okwui Enwezor, a curator of African ethnicity, who took the responsibility of curating and bringing in black artists to show what “Black aesthetics” mean. Some may also argue that the incorporation of Black artists’ works into the exhibition would internalize the threat to white supremacy through commercialization. Indeed, being exhibited at a large art institution like the New Museum would inevitably raise the market value of participating artists. However, inferring backward from the market result to intention would lead us astray. The selection of artists in this exhibition is very wide. It serves the function of surveying art representing black mourning. A survey exhibition about Black art will always be useful in the American social and political context. Due to the prevalent ‘Whiteness’ in thinking,[8] the BLM-led protests will never stop being controversial. In this case, there is always a need for exhibitions like this to remind all people of the black suffering.
To me, the future direction of the show perhaps lies in the expansion of the audience. The New Museum audience is known to be young and progressive art lovers. Perhaps, the New Museum’s regular audience already aligns with the most radical politics and are already adamant supporters of the BLM movement. The New Museum as the exhibition hosting location seems the most appropriate but also to some extent redundant. A year after the BLM-led protests, we are witnessing the backlash against the movement. Some conservative lawmakers are advocating for bills that aim to ban the discussion of systemic racism and critical race theory, whether they understand it or not, from the classroom. At this point, isn’t it all the more important to assess the risk of backlash and bring the art of black grieving to a larger audience to advance social justice?
[1] Judith Butler, “Between Grief and Grievance, a New Sense of Justice,” Grief and Grievance, (New Museum, 2020), 23. [2] Simon Wu, “’Grief and Grievance’ Shows Us Profound Visions of Black Suffering,” https://www.frieze.com/article/grief-and-grievance-2021-review, accessed on June 17th, 2021. [3] “Introduction to Art and Culture in the Global Age,” Tokyo University of the Arts Special Lecture by Claire Bishop Day 2, accessed on June 5, 2021. [4] “Grief and Grievance Art and Mourning in America – Book Review,” https://studiointernational.com/index.php/grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-book-review-okwui-enwezor-new-museum-exhibition, accessed on June 17th, 2021. [5] Grief and Grievance, 7. [6] Houston A. Baker Jr., Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, (University of Wisconsin, 1971). [7] “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-1, accessed on June 17th, 2021. [8] Donald Moss, “On Having Whiteness,” (Sage Journals, May, 2021), 355-371.