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Mourning in America
John Haberin New York City
Grief and Grievance in African American Art
It's mourning in America, but nowhere close to despair. Thirty-seven African American artists find grounds for hope in "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America."
Maybe only the cynical would see an echo of Ronald Reagan's "morning in America." If that includes you, too, try not to resist it. His promise to white America seems all the more dangerous and inescapable today, after four years of "make America great again." And the New Museum leaves no doubt as to its relevance. It opens with wall text about Trump's presentation at Gettysburg, the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Yet it also holds out the promise of a new morning, between its openness to reflection and its survey of African American art now. 
So many grievances
"Grief and Grievance" rolls off right off tongue, with its platitudes and alliteration. You may come expecting just another excuse for an oversized group show—and another display of art after Covid-19. The International Center of Photography has mourned for "Covid New York" splendidly enough, while MoMA is celebrating architecture and blackness. The New Museum, though, means something more disturbing. This is about black grief and white grievance, and its artists are not backing down. As a crawl screen from Charles Gaines has it, "race is not an empirical generalisation but an ontological affirmation."
There is so much grief, for all the cheering these days for diversity and identity politics, and there are so many grievances. They fill all four floors of the museum—a reminder that, for black America, there is no respite from mourning. Adam Pendleton covers every inch of the lobby walls with the harsh illusion of spray paint, in black and white, in what could almost approach Pendleton's abstraction. It dares you to hear voices from the street, like the strange words Grief Me Not. Don't cry for me, New York. It could be too late.
The show follows a summer of grief, with marches in support of Black Lives Matter. It also comes high on the heels of a far more lawless and violent display of grievance, January's storming of the Capitol. Okwui Enwezor could not have witnessed either one, for he died of cancer in March 2019. The poet and critic had prepared public lectures at Harvard on the theme of grief and grievance, when the New Museum invited him to make it into a show. He found an advisor in Glenn Ligon, who offers one of his nasty word salads in neon and paint. Blues Blood Bruise serves as a marquee on the museum's façade.
The curatorial team broadened after Enwezor's death, to include Naomi Beckwith and Mark Nash, but the show is very much his. Born and raised in Nigeria, he had curated Documenta in Berlin, a Venice Biennale, and photographs about apartheid. He knew this country well enough all the same. He emigrated to the Bronx at age eighteen, and he was just coming home. Still, he had enough of an outsider's perspective to take the long view. Blacks have been grieving, he insists, from the moment they became African Americans.
Not that they spend much time on the first cause of grief, slavery. Simone Leigh gives Alberto Giacometti and his Spoon Woman an African heritage, as Sentinel, and that is about it. Still, only the lobby galleries stick to today's news, as if to get it over and done. Even now, Arthur Jafa is the most stunning witness to Black Lives Matter with his video, Love Is the Message the Message Is Death—from its spent heroes to a burning close-up of solar flares. Like Sherrill Roland, not in the show, Garrett Bradley raises the need for prison reform, through video of a single mother whose intended faces incarceration. "I hate your hurt," he tells her, and her very name is Aloné.
Even here, grieving means looking back—and a felt isolation now. Terry Adkins brings x-ray photograms with the seeming ghosts of black bodies and precious possessions, Tiona Nekkia McClodden a machine, painted black, for ushering cattle to their death. Long before that, though, Jean-Michel Basquiat painted the police killing of Michael Stewart in 1983, long before Alfredo Jaar captured the sensation of tear gas directed at protests over the death of George Floyd at the 2022 Whitney Museum. And then there were the church bombings in Selma, Alabama, twenty years earlier still. Daniel LaRue Johnson and Jack Whitten both paid tribute. These are the show's only three dead artists, and each kicks off one of the three main floors.
Rest in peace
The New Museum describes its survey as intergenerational. Grieving, though, is all about the past, while grief exists entirely in the present. Even the three signature works take a back seat. Basquiat's Procession faces the elevators, but the other two are harder to spot, on back walls. Johnson envelops his modest collage in black paint, almost hiding a button for Freedom Now. Aluminum foil peels off Whitten's enigmatic abstraction, leaving a crater or a wound.
They may take a back seat, but the installations in front of them would overpower almost anything. Nari Ward brings the ultimate proof of grief, a hearse, and a persistent pain outweighs the living memories. Ward has blackened it further with grease and feathers, with pipes instead of level ground and mufflers suspended above. If there is any doubt who brought about the funeral, he calls it Peace Keeper, as in gun violence or the police. It also sits in a cage, suggestive of the trapped lives that remain. They are not going anywhere soon, least of all to rest in peace.
Rashid Johnson constructs his own room within a room, from shelves of books, potted plants, and shea butter. (One of the black authors, Te-Nehisi Coates, contributed to the show's catalog.) Not all, though, is dark. An unseen piano pounds out impressive chords, as Antoine's Organ. Even Ward's greasy surface gleams. If there is hope amid the grieving, it is in feelings and in art.
Whitten sets the tone for a small floor of black abstraction, apart from Johnson. Make that abstract art with a story to tell. Mark Bradford enlaces hints of black presences in yellow, red, and black paint. He painted in 2020, but the large canvas is also, he says, his response to the Watts Riots of 1965. Julie Mehretu displays unexpected subtlety in ink and acrylic after her exhilarating wide-open murals. She dedicates one to Enwezor.
Basquiat sets the tone for something more straightforward. Basquiat's crude outlines lead straight to Kerry James Marshall, with a black cop unable to let down his guard and interiors covered with glitter—which the museum compares to the bars of a prison. They look nostalgic enough, but they, too, are about mourning—for blues musicians, Martin Luther King, John and Robert F. Kennedy, and the black women who keep their dignity amid the glitter and the ghosts. They bring out the flatness in feathery abstractions by Ellen Gallagher and the polar blues of Lorna Simpson. They also bring out the political side of Melvin Edwards and his welded steel. His ten abstractions are his Lynch Fragments.
Again the subject is memory. Kara Walker trades her stereotypes and silhouettes for the black faces in her Book of Hours. Theaster Gates speaks of loss in his video's title, Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr, but the voices of a black choir never die. A magnificent church interior survives, too, even as workers crash its doors to the floor. Nor can they drown out the chanting that accompanies choreography by Okwui Okpokwasili a few rooms away. Strange Fruit for Kevin Beasley means used Nike Air Jordans, but also Billie Holiday's song about a lynching.
Grieving for whom?
Johnson brings things back to Alabama, on the show's largest floor. Grieving being what it is, the artists can never altogether leave personal or public remembrance, no more than Steffani Jemison (not in the show) when she revisits white reactions to blackness. It can indeed be hard to know one from the other. Sable Elyse Smith seems only to be filling a scrapbook with snapshots— Polaroids on suede that underscores their blackness. Yet her memories belong to not to herself, but to families divided by prison terms. Dawoud Bey is plainly looking out for others with his Birmingham Project, of paired subjects a generation apart, for the lives cut short by hate and the age those four girls would be today. Whether in armchairs or in the Baptist church where they died, the sitters look comfortable neither together nor on their own.
Are they mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, or are they stages in a human life? Fact and fiction merge, too, for Carrie Mae Weems, in reenactments of black history with the depth and glow of the movies. Yet reality intrudes once more with police records set beside young men. Weems has blocked out their mouths and their names, perhaps to protect them, but the act could stand for all that has blocked out their future. People for Deana Lawson throw themselves into the anonymity of a crowd, at a festival or a congregation. One might never know that their absence from a landscape marks it as wallpaper at a funeral home.
While each floor has its theme, some of the best juxtapositions cut across floors. That includes abstraction, which the curators see as a release from fateful events. With Howardena Pindell and her Autobiography, even that is impossible. Her mix of text, collage, and her own image stands somewhere between her abstract paintings and her installations. New media appear often as well, including video of black performance by Kahlil Joseph—or audio of Tyshawn Sorey on drums. The show's darkest rooms may bring its greatest comforts.
Other echoes across floors are more elusive and all the more enticing for that. After all the music, is it a stretch to think of sheet music for Jennie C. Jones? Not when Gaines bases his scores on the spoken word. A regular ping from Sorey resembles the chime of a doorway for Cameron Rowland back in the lobby. That door also has a magnetic strip for greater protection against, well, unwanted black males. But then Diamond Stingily leans baseball bats against doors because her grandmother used them to keep strangers out herself.
A ceramic pelvis from Julia Phillips recalls the concavity of Leigh's Sentinel, but with the illusion of raw flesh and veins. Henry Taylor may depict a judge ruling against a little boy, but with a flatness akin to Marshall's. Arthur Jafa in his contemporary black history may lack overt politics. Yet it looks all the more poignant and sweeping every day. And Hank Willis Thomas sums up them all, with black flags running along the stairs. Their fifteen thousand stars preserve not points of light, but deaths by gunshot.
You could fault the show for playing it safe with names you know, although a show without such stars as Kehinde Wiley is itself a blessing. You could fault it too for what it leaves out. What about a deeper history, of black artists and America? What about going beyond the smug dichotomy of black grief and white grievance—in others who have marched with African Americans and mourned for them? Did you know that Abel Meeropol, the white Jewish composer of "Strange Fruit," adopted the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? What for that matter about the twisted perspective of white grievance?
Still, that would miss out on a remarkable focus. Then, too, there truly is a perspective on white grievance, if only by its absence. LaToya Ruby Frazier travels to Pennsylvania, where her family lives and the coal plants have died, for one last set of photograph in series. She refuses to pose them—taking them alone or together, resting or unable to rest, as they are. She has particular affection for her grandmother, and the younger sitters may not long sustain their swagger. Talk all you like about economic anxiety among Trump voters, but just remember who most feels the loss.
"Grief and Grievance" ran at the New Museum through June 6, 2021.