the people in grenfell died because they were poor.
the people in grenfell died because their landlord chose to spend money on flammable cladding because rich tenants in nearby penthouses didn’t like the ugly council building ruining their view.
the people in grenfell died because their landlord chose not to spend money on a centralised fire system or sprinklers or an additional fire escape.
the people in grenfell died because the tories voted against a law that would force landlords to make their buildings inhabitable and safe for their tenants.
the people in grenfell died because of the privatisation of social housing.
the people in grenfell burnt to death with their children in their arms because they were poor.
To the curators and staff of the Whitney biennial:
I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.
As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the open casket that his mother chose, saying, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily and in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all. In brief: the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.
Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist – those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.
Emmett Till’s name has circulated widely since his death. It has come to stand not only for Till himself but also for the mournability (to each other, if not to everyone) of people marked as disposable, for the weight so often given to a white woman’s word above a Black child’s comfort or survival, and for the injustice of anti-Black legal systems. Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture: the evidence of their collective lack of understanding is that Black people go on dying at the hands of white supremacists, that Black communities go on living in desperate poverty not far from the museum where this valuable painting hangs, that Black children are still denied childhood. Even if Schutz has not been gifted with any real sensitivity to history, if Black people are telling her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.
Ongoing debates on the appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists have highlighted the relation of these appropriations to the systematic oppression of Black communities in the US and worldwide, and, in a wider historical view, to the capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people with which our present era began. Meanwhile, a similarly high-stakes conversation has been going on about the willingness of a largely non-Black media to share images and footage of Black people in torment and distress or even at the moment of death, evoking deeply shameful white American traditions such as the public lynching. Although derided by many white and white-affiliated critics as trivial and naive, discussions of appropriation and representation go to the heart of the question of how we might seek to live in a reparative mode, with humility, clarity, humour and hope, given the barbaric realities of racial and gendered violence on which our lives are founded. I see no more important foundational consideration for art than this question, which otherwise dissolves into empty formalism or irony, into a pastime or a therapy.
The curators of the Whitney biennial surely agree, because they have staged a show in which Black life and anti-Black violence feature as themes, and been approvingly reviewed in major publications for doing so. Although it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that blackness is hot right now, driven into non-Black consciousness by prominent Black uprisings and struggles across the US and elsewhere, I choose to assume as much capacity for insight and sincerity in the biennial curators as I do in myself. Which is to say – we all make terrible mistakes sometimes, but through effort the more important thing could be how we move to make amends for them and what we learn in the process. The painting must go.
Thank you for reading Hannah Black Artist/writer Whitney ISP 2013-14
Co-signatories/with the support of:
Amal Alhaag Hannah Assebe Anwar Batte Charmaine Bee Parker Bright Vivian Crockett Jareh Das Aria Dean Chrissy Etienne Hamishi Farah Ja'Tovia Gary Juliana Huxtable Anisa Jackson Hannah Catherine Jones Devin Kenny Carolyn Lazard Taylor LeMelle Tiona Nekkia McClodden Sandra Mujinga Precious Okoyomon Emmanuel Olunkwa Imani Robinson Andrew Ross Christina Sharpe Misu Simbiatu Dominique White Kandis Williams
31 March–6 May 2017 Preview: 30 March, 6–8:30pm #HalesGallery
Questions of cultural identity – feelings of belonging to a particular group – seem especially relevant in today’s troubled Western society, increasingly international and yet as riven as ever with conflict and fear of others. How are our perceptions of identity formed; which stereotypes, fictions or representations have informed them? How do the categories of class, gender, race and nationality intersect and overlap to create one’s sense of self (and other)?
For the three artists in this exhibition – Ebony G Patterson, Thomas J Price and Zadie Xa – visual and material forms of representation provide a potent strategy through which to pose these challenging and timely questions. Working in a diverse range of media, including sculpture, video, textiles and photography, these artists are united by their shared engagement with form, process and material. They each amalgamate different social and cultural references, fashions and art historical traditions to create new layered, hybrid mythologies that express the multi-faceted nature of identity in the 21st century. Through a simultaneous process of seduction and deconstruction, they powerfully challenge our conventional associations, assumptions and archetypes.
Ebony Patterson
Ebony G Patterson’s fantastically ornate images and installations explore the performance of identity among disenfranchised communities within post-colonial contexts. Patterson’s bold, seductive aesthetic reflects the artist’s desire to claim space and authority for subjects whom society so often deems unworthy of visibility, whilst refusing to shy away from the more complicated or contradictory elements of different identities.
Entourage (2010), the first piece from Patterson’s ‘Fambily’ series of photographic installations (2010–13), explores the role of the gang as a surrogate family – a complex structure whose positive elements are usually ignored in favour of lazy stigmatisation. A large-scale studio photograph printed on a nylon banner and installed dramatically on floral-wallpapered walls, makes an immediate claim for attention. The depicted subjects, too, are elaborately costumed and made-up, reflecting the flamboyant visual language of Jamaica’s popular Dancehall culture. The individuals in the photograph, however, are all models. Central to the work’s heightened sense of theatricality is the concept of identity as performative, shifting and contradictory, the hyper-masculinity of the gang patriarch expressed through a conventionally feminised aesthetic of tight, colourful clothing, jewellery, and even artificially whitened skin as a mode of erasure and illumination.
Thomas J Price makes figurative sculptures depicting imaginary black, male subjects, playing with material, scale and modes of display in order to explore the relationship between representation and perception. This exhibition presents Price’s most recent work, the Untitled (Icon) series: a new sequence of fictional portraits that are amalgamations of a range of sources, from classical sculpture to individuals observed in Price’s everyday life.
Constantly experimenting with materials and technologies, for the Untitled (Icon) series Price has adopted two techniques for the first time: gilding, and 3D modelling. The use of 24 carat gold leaf has a powerful cultural resonance, as a technique which dates back to ancient Egypt and continues to signify luxury, splendour and exultation. The subjects depicted in these gilded sculptures, placed upon marble plinths in a classical style, are cast as ‘icons’ of a modern age, despite their anonymous, ‘untitled’ identities. Price subtly subverts the viewer’s expectations, reframing the image and associations of black men in contemporary society and in art. This sense of subversion is heightened by the knowledge that these heads were sculpted using cutting-edge 3D modelling techniques before being cast in aluminium composite, a digital amalgamation of features with no rooting in reality. We are led to wonder whether the individual’s ‘true’ identity really exists, amidst or beneath the layers of constructed presentation and conditioned perception.
Zadie Xa’s work across media layers and samples pre-existing forms to create new images and objects which explores the construction and performance of identity, navigating her position within the Asian diaspora. Whether working in video or creating highly textural mixed media works, this process of layering combines racial tropes used to identify Asian bodies as ‘other’ (the commodified yin-yang symbol, ‘monolid’ eyes, sword blades) with diverse material from a range of personally relevant sources – music, digital technology, fashion and art, as well as Xa’s own research into her cultural heritage – in order to conjure an alternative narrative of Asian identity.
Xa’s recent practice is represented in this exhibition with three interconnected works: video Moodrings, Crystals and Opal-coloured Stones (2016); Asian Gucci (2016), an over-sized fan; and SVN Stacks/Moon Marauder (2015), one of Xa’s self-described ‘magical garments’ existing on the border between costume and painting. The fabric surface of the garment is textured with a series of coded forms, notably the ‘monolid’ and the initial ‘G’, which refers to the Ganggangsullae,an ancient Korean women’s folk dance. Performance footage of the Ganggangsullae is incorporated into Moodrings, Crystals and Opal-coloured Stones, whose central narrative is based on Xa’s own journey retracing a different traditional Korean practice: the initiation rituals for female shamans, known as mudang, which Xa imaginatively re-enacts costumed in her self-made garment. One of the transformative mudang rituals known as the ‘riding of the blades’ is invoked also in the shiny silver knife blades that embellish the surface of Asian Gucci. Across these multi-layered works, the mysterious, performative and transformational nature of identity is expressed, and the concept of a fixed, authentic self is thrown into doubt.
Ebony G Patterson (b. 1981, Kingston, Jamaica) studied at Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts (2000–04) and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (2004–06). Patterson’s work has been exhibited in numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York (USA), the Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C. (USA), Bermuda National Gallery (Bermuda), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (USA), Perez Art Museum, Miami (USA), 12th Havana Biennial (Cuba), the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (USA), the 32nd Bienal de Sao Paulo (Brazil) and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (USA). Since 2006 Patterson’s work has been selected for inclusion in the Jamaica Biennial, winning the Aaron Matalon award for most outstanding contribution in 2014. Patterson is also the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (USA). Work by Patterson is included in a number of international collections including Studio Museum in Harlem (USA), the Nasher Museum, Duke University (USA), Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art (France) and the National Gallery of Jamaica (Jamaica). She has taught at the University of Virginia and is currently an Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky.
Thomas J Price
Thomas J Price (b. London, UK, 1981) studied at Chelsea College of Art (2001–04) and received an MA at the Royal College of Art, Sculpture School (2004–06). In 2009, Price was featured alongside Grayson Perry, Michael Landy, Sir Anthony Caro and Cornelia Parker on the BBC 4 television documentary, Where is Modern Art Now?, presented by Gus Casely-Hayford. In 2010, he featured on BBC 4’s How to Get A Head in Sculpture, also featuring Marc Quinn and Sir Anthony Caro. In 2010, Price was an invited artist at the Royal Academy Summer Show. In 2013, during his second solo show with Hales Gallery, Price presented his first large scale sculpture Network. The work subsequently was placed on display at the prestigious Yorkshire Sculpture Park, coinciding with Price’s solo display at the Park (2014), and was selected for the 2015 inauguration of London’s art walk The Line. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at prestigious institutions including the National Portrait Gallery, London (UK), Royal Academy of Arts, London (UK), Mac Birmingham (UK), Royal College of Art, London (UK), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK), Harewood House (UK) and Hales London (UK). Price’s work has also been included in shows in the US and Europe. Price’s work is included in a number of private and public collections including Derwent London (UK), Murderme (UK) and the Rennie Collection (Canada). Price lives and works in London.
Zadie Xa
Zadie Xa (b. 1983, Vancouver, Canada) received an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and a BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2007. Recent exhibitions, performances and screenings of Xa’s work have been held at a range of institutions, including the Serpentine Gallery, London (UK), Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK), Assembly Point, London (UK), CGP London (UK), Cafe OTO, London (UK), Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (UK), Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome (Italy) and Schwabinger Tor, Munich (Germany). Upcoming exhibitions and performances include Block Universe 2017, Pumphouse Gallery (solo) London (UK), and Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (Canada). Xa currently lives and works in London.
![#moodboard RP @artnewsafrica ・・・
Via @forafricans
Primary school students learn to swim in their burkinis. Zanzibar, Tanzania. ©Anna Boyiasiz [@annaboyiazis]](https://66.media.tumblr.com/d497e7f42a2c32a3e2ed28b2a5f4030d/tumblr_ot1t0fxYpn1qao5wmo1_250.jpg)
