Memory is a tough place. The New School Art Collection’s strength lies in its attentiveness to race and social justice. Photographs make up 30% of the collection. Many of these works were made in the late 1980s and early 90s, a period in which some artists used the documentary form of photography and related mediums to develop powerful portraits of themselves and their communities, while others highlighted the violence done to such communities. Photography has an important evidentiary role to play in capturing the complex upheavals and ruptures that accompany social change: it has long been used to document social injustice, and to spur resistance. But images can also perpetuate such injustice by positioning violence as spectacle, a form of entertainment that traps rather than frees its victims. Roland Barthes wrote that the photograph is a visual paradox. That paradox can become a double bind: to represent or not to represent. And if to represent, what to represent? Suffering, as in Ben Fernandez’s final image of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Countdown to Eternity? Defiance, as in Brian Lanker’s portrait of Rosa Parks, or as embodied by Renée Cox, standing naked and proud in the South Bronx? Or the body that stands yearning in Lyle Ashton Harris’s I longed for the relationship? Extending the concerns of The Collection’s works in this exhibition are two graduates of Parsons’ Fine Arts MFA program: Sable Elyse Smith and American Artist. They foreground the ways in which the carceral system disappears bodies, pointing to the insufficiency of the image as evidence in our time. The artists in this exhibition both engage and trouble the politics of representation. Considered collectively, their works meditate upon the vexed relationship between memory, photography, and social justice. —Macushla Robinson, Curator Macushla Robinson is an alumna of The New School Liberal Studies department (class of 2017) and is currently pursuing her PhD in The New School’s Politics Program. She is curatorial assistant at The New School Art Collection. We gratefully acknowledge the support of The New School Art Collection. This exhibition’s title and quotes are drawn from Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book Citizen.
Ben Fernandez (b. 1936, America) Countdown to Eternity, Photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s Printed later, 1989 Gelatin silver prints Edition of 50, with 10 Artist’s Proofs The New School Art Collection, Inv # 1887 Gift of the artist, 1999
Taken by Ben Fernandez — photojournalist, educator, and founder of Parsons’ photography department — this suite of photographs documents both public and intimate moments in the last year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. They begin with King’s speech to the United Nations on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his death. Although these photographs were made in the mode of photojournalism, their portentous title imbues them with a sense of foreboding and melancholy. Each image edges the civil rights leader closer to his death. The final one shows the open casket of Dr. King. For the purposes of this exhibition, it has been covered with black felt. Please be warned that beneath it there is an image of a murdered body.
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960, America) Condition Report, 2000 Silkscreen on Iris print (in two parts) Edition of 20 The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0148 Purchased 2000
While working as an intern at the Studio Museum, Harlem in the early 1980s, Glenn Ligon saw Ernest Withers’ iconic photograph of the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike in Congressman Charles Rangel’s office. He would later reproduce the placard that these photographs made famous as a painting. Made ten years after the painting, the etchings revisit Ligon’s earlier work — an early experiment with text in which Ligon rendered the slogan in enamel and oil on a canvas that matched the original placard in scale — which shaped his practice for decades. The image on the left is a reproduction of the painting. The same image on the right bears the inscriptions of the conservator, Michael Duffy. Ligon repurposed the conservator’s report as a metaphor: “it was about detailing not only the physical aging of the painting over time — all the cracks and paint loss and all of that — but also changing ideas about masculinity, changing ideas about the relationship we have to the Civil Rights Movement.” (Ligon, interviewed by David Drogen, Museo Magazine, 2010.) In 2013, it was revealed that Ernest Withers had been an FBI informant when he took the photograph that is the basis of the image. This news complicates Withers’ legacy as one of the great chroniclers of the civil rights movement. In light of this new information, Ligon’s images, and his interest in our changing relationship to the Civil Rights movement, take on new complexity. Glenn Ligon’s site-specific installation Comrades and Lovers can be seen at The New School University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, Event Café.
American Artist (b. 1989) Sandy Speaks, 2017 A.I. Chat Platform, projection Courtesy American Artist
In the year leading up to her death in custody, Sandra Bland made a series of videos, posted to YouTube, collectively titled Sandy Speaks. She believed in the power of the digital medium: “This thing that I’m holding in my hand, this telephone, this camera. It is quite powerful. Social media is powerful. We can do something with this. If we want a change, we can really, truly make it happen.” The social media activist was detained after being pulled over for failing to signal a lane change in Waller County, Texas. Three days later she was found dead in her cell. Her violent arrest was captured by the police officer’s dashboard cam, and broadcast to the world, but there is no footage that might act as evidence of how she died. This piece, by recent Parsons MFA graduate American Artist, is a chatbot: a digital interface built on AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), which is used in phone trees and technologies that prevent you from reaching a human being on the phone. Hijacking this technology of the state, the Sandy Speaks chatbot greets participants with the salutation, “Good afternoon Queen/King!” American Artist says that when making this work he was thinking about Sandra Bland’s “transition from hypervisibility during her arrest to tragic invisibility at her time of death. I imagined what Sandra would have said during her time in jail had she been granted a level of exposure similar to that which was applied to her encounter with the police.” (American Artist, quoted in Priscilla Frank, ‘Chatbot Sandy Speaks Continues Sandra Bland’s Legacy of Education and Activism,” Huffington Post, September 27, 2016.)
Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, America) I Longed for the Relationship, 1993 C-print The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0147 Purchased 1993
This enigmatic image shows a figure standing in a domestic interior, between two lifesized black mannequins holding drink trays. The text, superimposed over the figure’s white t-shirt, expresses frustration — chafing against the expectations and constraints placed on Black artists: “I am the ‘multicultural’ character personified,” it reads. The work speaks of the double bind in which artists of color find themselves. They are continually expected to embody and make sense of the politics around race and sexuality. Any stepping back from this demand inevitably meets the resistance of those who would silence that experience. The call to represent oneself through the lens of identity politics is at once necessary and a trap: there can be no work that is in itself, for itself; yet, you can never be political enough without being labelled too political. Here, Lyle Ashton Harris longs not for a romantic relationship but rather the relationship he might have with his work in the private space of the studio, in the domestic sphere. Like Odili Donald Odita’s work Authentic African (also in this exhibition), I Longed for The Relationship manifests the difficulty of embodying a cultural stereotype, and the constraints as well as the joys of contending with identity politics.
Kara Walker A Means to an End...A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, 1995 Etching and aquatint (five plates) Edition 5 of 20 The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0619 Purchased 1996
Kara Walker evokes the violence of racial stereotypes in life-sized silhouettes. Popular in the antebellum South, the silhouette was a common form of middle class portraiture. It was more affordable and portable than painting, and was particularly prevalent in the decades before photography’s invention. Indeed the silhouette, also known as a shadowgraph or scissortype, could be classed as an early form of photography, as it is elaborated from a process of throwing light and shadow. In the 1830s, these images were often cut by a machine. Walker’s silhouettes are projections of 19th Century racial injustice, evocations of a racial imaginary. They depict the nightmare of ante-bellum slavery and the shadow it casts on the present. For Walker’s solo exhibition My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Walker Art Center in 2007, curator Philippe Vergne wrote that, “Walker manipulates codes and taboos, such as humor and sexuality, to disclose her doubts about representation and to channel her discontent and anger over a broken social contract.” (My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007, p. 8.)
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1951, America) Black Boy Said, 1987 Gelatin silver print Edition 3 of 3 The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0048 Donated by Frank and Patty Kolodny, 2000
Carrie Mae Weems has long used photography to create nuanced portraits of Black life in America. Her series Family Pictures and Stories 1978 – 84 responded specifically to a comment by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which blamed “the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society” on a “weak family structure.” The same comments would inspire Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers to write ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.’ Over 30 years, Weems’ work has represented the Black experience as it is lived, rather than imagined. Occupying the space between documentary and art, each image is accompanied by a narrative fragment that imbues its subject with poetic meaning. Black Boy Said pairs a portrait of a small boy with a single line of text. With few words, she reveals the ways in which racism is internalized. Girl Evidently The Man… (also in this exhibition) looks through a bedroom door to a domestic interior. A man’s hat rests on the end of a woman’s bed, marking a presence. The text recalls the kinds of intimate conversations that women have among themselves.
Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, America) Thurgood in the Hour of Chaos, from Exit Art portfolio “America America”, 2009 Photo lithograph Edition 23 of 50, with 8 Artist’s Proofs, 5 Printer’s Proofs The New School Art Collection, Inv # 2238 Gift of Exit Art, 2012
In this self-portrait, Rashid Johnson poses as Thurgood Marshall, a distinguished lawyer, and subsequent Supreme Court justice, best known for litigating Brown v Board of Education. The image is overlaid with the ‘crosshair’ — the focus in a gun sight — adopted by the band Public Enemy to represent the relationship of the Black man in America to the State. By combining these images, Thurgood In The Hour Of Chaos enacts the binary condition of Black masculinity. On one hand, Thurgood wears a coat and tie, and represents the most socially acceptable of roles — a successful lawyer and judge. On the other, the equally iconic logo of Public Enemy invokes the threat of state violence against Black men like Marshall who work for justice and recognition in America.
Brian Lanker (b. 1947, d. 2011, America) Beah Richards, 1989 Gelatin silver print The New School Art Collection, Inv # 1742 Gift of Elizabeth Dickey, 2000
These photographs are part of a series titled I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, which portrays 75 Black women in academia, the arts, business, athletics, and the civil rights movement. Partly inspired by Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple, Lanker took on the project to counter his own innate sexism and racism as a white man in a system that afforded him immense privilege. He spent three days with each subject, beginning with an interview and only shooting the image on the final day. Parts of the interview were included alongside each portrait in the book that was published of the series. Of the three portraits in this collection, Rosa Parks is the most historically significant figure. Her refusal to abide by the segregationist policies of the Alabama public transport authorities was a formative moment in the civil rights movement. Wilma Rudolph was a track and field star who won multiple gold medals and was known as the fastest woman in the world in the 1960s. Beah Richards was a poet, playwright, and actor who was a Tony and Academy Award nominee. Each portrait hails an organizer, a pioneer, a trailblazer of one kind or another. Yet, as Maya Angelou wrote in the foreword, “They are not apparitions; they are not superwomen. They are not larger than life.� Whether public figures, who acted on the stage, broke athletic records, or otherwise defied the roles assigned to them, or less well-known women who collected signatures or sued school boards, they all changed America.
RenĂŠe Cox (b. 1958, Jamaica) Liberty in the South Bronx, 1996 Gelatin silver print The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0797 Purchased 1997
Renée Cox often places herself at the center of her images. In Liberty in the South Bronx, she poses naked atop a pile of detritus, holding aloft a bundle of chains just as Lady Liberty holds aloft a torch. This piece dates from the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s, when many artists made representations of race and gender the center of their works. During this time, Cox created a comic book alter ego called Rajé, whom she positioned as the granddaughter of Nubia, the civil rights movement’s reimagining of Wonder Woman. While Wonder Woman wears the colors of the American flag, Rajé’s costume is in the colors of the Jamaican flag. The piece is about a place, the South Bronx, a site of Black culture’s empowerment and resistance (and the birthplace of hip hop). It represents the artist’s first ‘intervention.’ She describes it as “the first serious piece that I did, in my opinion. That was the beginning of the journey” noting that, “[t]here’s a great empowerment in being nude, in being completely naked, that I discovered on that particular shoot.” (Renée Cox interviewed by Nicole Plett, Rutgers University Inn, New Brunswick, 2008, np.) As Kathleen Goncharov, former curator of The New School Art Collection, noted at the time of the acquisition, Cox “commiserates with the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of American democracy and equality who, had she come alive at the time of her arrival from France, would not have been allowed to vote. As a woman of the African diaspora, Rajé would have had to wait even longer for this basic right.” (Curator’s notes, The New School Art Collection records, 1997.)
Nancy Barton (b. 1957, America) and Michael Glass (b. 1961, d. 2015, America) Untitled (There are Madnesses), 1990 Mixed media The New School Art Collection, Inv # 1558 Gift of the Estate of Jay Chiat, 2004
This work intersperses images from the news, including Danny Lyon’s well-known “Arrest of Taylor Washington, Atlanta” (1963), with the covers of popular psychology and self-help books. The juxtaposition raises questions about both the psychological impact and moral imperatives of looking at suffering, echoing the issue raised by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others: what good does it do to look at suffering about which one can do nothing? There is no simple answer to this question. According to Nancy Barton:
This piece was created as part of a larger installation, Butter Wouldn’t Melt in My Mouth, which addressed themes of guilt, race, class, and the psychological impact of suffering on those who internalize social burdens. […] There Are Madnesses was intended to contrast two different ways of dealing with ‘bad’ circumstances: on the one hand, through ‘concerned’ documentary photography, and on the other, through the use of ‘self-help’ books that attempt to overcome difficulties through initiating selfchange. Our intention here was to consider the mechanisms of representation by which individuals attempt to master circumstances beyond their control.
(Personal correspondence, May 4, 2017.)
Eunsuk Joo Eol Gool #9, 1995 – 1996 Chromogenic print The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0877 Gift of Parsons Photography Student, 1999
The title of this work, Eol Gool, is a phonetic transcription of the Korean word for ‘face.’ It is one of a series of portraits of women of Asian descent who the artist met in the street in New York City. Their shared foreignness was a catalyst for an encounter, a form or recognition, even identification, “a way of mapping out my own identity relocated in a foreign land.” (Artist’s statement, Julie Bateman Fine Art, nd.) While triggered by similarity, these portraits also attend to difference, to those features that mark the face as absolutely unique. By its very nature, portraiture dwells on the particular, amplifying that which defines its subject. Portraiture is here a way of processing the artist’s complex experience of being an Asian woman in a multicultural city.
Right: Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, America) Ironwood, 2015 Calipatria, 2015 Avenal, 2015 Receiving Center, 2015 Digital C-prints Courtesy Sable Elyse Smith Left: Sable Elyse Smith The History of Silence Video, 5 minutes 51 seconds Courtesy Sable Elyse Smith
These photographs show aerial views of prisons. They reflect the artist’s experience of visiting her father in various prisons over the past 20 years. In these images, the camera fixes its gaze on the buildings into which bodies disappear; the body is not represented, but absented. Whereas Carrie Mae Weems’ work seeks to counter claims that the African American family is deficient by documenting her community through photography, Sable Elyse Smith reveals the apparatus of the state that breaks Black families. There are more African Americans under criminal supervision in the USA now than there were slaves in 1850. One in three young Black men will go to jail at some point in their lives. As Michelle Alexander points out in Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, America has not “ended racial caste, but simply redesigned it.” Like American Artist’s work Sandy Speaks, Smith’s work insists on photography’s inability to enter the scene of devastation, to act as evidence of the living death that is prison in this country. Drawing on theories of trauma and transgenerational memory, The History of Silence is a fragmented, episodic film that evokes, without making sense of, the violence of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. A dictator commonly referred to as El Jefe (the boss), he ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. During this time tens of thousands were killed by the government. Trujillo’s rule was one of many dictatorial regimes in the Caribbean — one of many ricocheting legacies of transatlantic slavery. Current psychological theories hold that trauma can travel across generations as a form of ‘post memory’ that lives in the body as visceral sensation, dislocation, and flashbacks. Conjuring the ways that historical violence impact the present, the history of silence is the history of a diaspora.
James Luna (b. 1950, America) Half Indian-Half Mexican (triptych), 1991 Gelatin silver prints Edition of 6 The New School Art Collection, Inv # 0617 Purchased 1993
To make this self-portrait, James Luna shaved one half of his moustache off and slicked back one half of his hair. Across the triptych, he ironically inhabits cliché representations of both his mother’s and his father’s ancestry. The images take the form of a ‘mug-shot,’ gesturing towards racial profiling in law enforcement and the high incarceration rates of people of color in America. A member of California’s Luiseño tribe, Luna’s self-portraits and performances play on stereotypes in order to undermine them. He is perhaps best known for The Artifact Piece (1987/1990), in which he lay in a display case in the Museum of Man in San Diego, surrounded by objects from his own life: his degree, divorce papers, personal memorabilia, and case labels for each of the scars on his body. He parodied the widespread depiction of Native Americans as part of a long dead past, complicating the collective understanding of his culture in the white racial imaginary by asserting his living presence. “I had long looked at representation of our peoples in museums and they all dwelled in the past. They were one-sided. We were simply objects among bones, bones among objects, and then signed and sealed with a date. In that framework you really couldn’t talk about joy, intelligence, humor, or anything that I know makes up our people.” (James Luna, quoted in Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Rebecca Tillett [eds], Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating, Reclaiming, New York: SUNY Press, 2013.)
Sable Elyse Smith Untitled, 2015 Aluminum signboard, plastic letters Courtesy Sable Elyse Smith