“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”

In the year prior to his untimely death in March 2019, Okwui Enwezor was developing an exhibition to coincide with the 2020 presidential election that would examine “the crystallization of black grief, in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance.”1 That his vision—realized by a curatorial team including Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Lignon, and Mark Nash—feels so pertinent today is a sobering reflection on both the American status quo and the magnitude of the loss of Enwezor’s voice.

The immersive aural experience of “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” is haunting; immediately on entering the exhibition, the viewer is enveloped by a soundscape that continues to reverberate long after leaving it. The effect begins with Rashid Johnson’s Antoine’s Organ (2016), a towering ecosystem built around black steel scaffolding that houses an upright piano nestled among plants, its various elements emitting layers of sound to produce a captivating cacophony. Enwezor’s curatorial practice placed a longstanding emphasis on the sonic, and several pieces here involve musical compositions and performances: Charles Gaines’ Manifestos 3 (2018), Tyshawn Sorey’s Pillars (2018), and Theaster Gates’ Gone are the Days of Shelter and Martyr (2014).

As the viewer descends from the fourth floor to the third, they are confronted with a series of sculptural works, each forming an inventory of a long history of racial violence in the US. How to capture this ever-present violence preoccupies many of the artists in “Grief and Grievance.” Only after reaching the bottom of the narrow staircase, and gazing back at the banners hanging from the ceiling, can visitors take in Hank Willis Thomas’s 14,719 (2018) in its entirety, and assimilate its reference. The crisp navy-blue banners, stitched with rows of white stars, flawless and precise, recall and repurpose the American flag, each star memorializing someone shot and killed in America in 2018.

Each of Melvin Edwards’s small-scale wall reliefs, welded together from steel objects—locks, chains, nails, shovels, and horseshoes—is a cold, quiet narrative of the way life and labor are fused together through violence. Part of “Lynch Fragments,” a series he began in 1963, the sculptures hang at eye level, challenging the viewer to imagine the violent uses to which even everyday materials can be put. Diamond Stingily brings mundane objects from her childhood in Chicago’s West Side into the museum, commemorating Black cultural memory while questioning what belongs in the space. Here, three apartment doors from the series “Entryways” (2016, 2019) are lined up against a wall, each with a baseball bat propped up against it, as her grandmother used to do. While gesturing to the violence that shadowed her childhood community, Stingily also acknowledges the resilience of matriarchs who protect their domestic spaces.

The particular challenges faced by Black women are highlighted throughout the exhibition. In a selection from The Notion of Family (2001–14), Latoya Ruby Frazier uses the medium of social documentary photography to capture the marginalized stories of her hometown of Braddock, PA. The home of one of the country’s first steel mills, the town has suffered the same fate as many in post-industrial America; unemployment, white flight, divestment of resources and infrastructure. Frazier’s photographs center on the women in her family; through a series of portraits of herself, her mother, and her grandmother, she uses the camera as a weapon through which they assert agency. They are not only subjects, but also the authors and producers of the narrative, facing the camera head-on, defiant and unflinching. Garrett Bradley’s documentary short Alone (2017), engages with similar textures of intimacy as it follows Aloné Watts in her struggle to answer the question: “What would it mean to marry someone behind bars?” Voiceovers by Watts and her fiancé accompany footage of a daily life shaped by the violence of the prison-industrial complex, a system aptly compared to slavery in intent and design.

Several artists here employ the documentary qualities of black-and-white photography to stage their own restorative archives in projects that seek to bring the marginalized to the center of the frame, while challenging the traditional format of portraiture. In a series of diptychs, Dawoud Bey’s “The Birmingham Project” (2012) combines a portrait of a child (the age of one of the four victims of the bombings at the 6th Street Baptist Church on 15 September 1963, and of the two other linked attacks in the city that day) with one of an adult, 50 years older (the age that child would be now, had they survived). Likewise, in her series “Constructing History” (2008), Carrie Mae Weems claims authorial power by reimagining and restaging momentous events such as The Assassination of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm or The Capture of Angela. These works express the urgent need for commemoration, for remembering and recognizing one’s own history on one’s own terms.

Above all else, “Grief and Grievance” is an insistence that Black grief, like Black life, is as varied, multifaceted, and generative as it is profoundly painful. No piece better encapsulates this spectrum of experience than Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), with its fast-paced collage of protests, sporting events, music performances, street life, and police brutality set to Kanye West’s gospel-inflected “Ultralight Beam” (2016). The accumulation of scenes across a broad emotional register is both exhilarating and exhausting. Like many of the works in this exhibition, Jafa’s seven-minute montage is by now something of a classic. It is testament to Enwezor’s dedication to amplifying the work of Black artists that many of these names will already be familiar to their audience; the intergenerational dialogue between the 37 participants in “Grief and Grievance” allows for an act of collective mourning, celebration, and commemoration in the face of a national emergency.