Race, Myth, Art and Justice

“We are in a historic moment of heightened racism, of myths designed to further fracture a young nation still on the path of healing and dealing with the inhumane ravages of enslavement. Myths presented as truths frame a narrative of increased racism, exclusion, poverty, incarceration and displacement.”

“...Yet our creative actions through demonstrations, through rallies at the steps of officialdom or the stoops of El Barrio are art in motion. It is the eye of the artist-photographer that captures those magical moments that bear witness to the greatness of what we have been, are capable of, and are doing for our future. They ignite our imaginary, implore us to assume the responsibility that we must value, fight for, and embrace, truth!”

Dr. Marta Moreno Vega
Multidisciplinary Intersectional Project Coordinator, Race, Myth, Art and Justice

President, Creative Justice Initiative

Founder, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute

“Adjusting to America as a new immigrant came with tremendous struggles; what I was not prepared for, however, was the trauma of having to reconcile myself as a raced body. I found the labels “other,” “minority,” and “alien” acts of erasure. The constant onslaught of other people’s language, other people’s labels, other people’s framing, was daunting. Language matters. No human being is a “minority.” Just as no human being is “illegal.” This too is a great myth; one that has had irreparable damage on our collective psyche.”

Grace Aneiza Ali
Co-Curator, Race, Myth, Art and Justice

Assistant Professor, Art & Public Policy, New York University

“With the passing of the musical artist and cultural icon Randy Weston, it is appropriate to draw a parallel between his exemplar life and art and those of the artists in the exhibit Race, Myth, Art and Justice. Like Weston, our artists—Kwesi Abbensetts, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Terry Boddie, John E. Dowell, Jr., Adama Delphine Fawundu, Jonathan Gardenhire, Deborah Jack, Zoraida Lopez-Diago, Radcliffe Roye, Ming Smith, Stan Squirewell, and Deborah Willis—have all honored their African or African Diasporic heritages in theme, style, and practice. Like Weston, they all celebrate and utilize the power of myth in the formation and transformation of history, sense of self and contemporary society. And finally, like Randy Weston, the artists in Race, Myth, Art and Justice realize that it is their responsibility to use their tremendous talents in the pursuit of justice for humanity and the environment, fulfilling a spiritual and moral obligation to make this world a better place for us now and for the future.”

C. Daniel Dawson
Co-Curator, Race, Myth, Art and Justice

These images, from his series The Masking: Super Powers, are all about transformation, or rather photography’s power to transcend reality by transforming and ennobling certain people who are chosen as subjects precisely because they bring a new set of imaginations to the ancient art of representation.

Without hyping on the sociocultural, these black faces are quietly bringing the pulse back to classic black-and-white portraiture.

They are part of an archeology that is taking place right now, all over the African diaspora, as a new generation of artists and image-makers decides to revisit and revise old-fashioned (and often racist) ideas of what black beauty is supposed to be.

Excerpt from “Tomorrow You May Not See Me at All”
By Claude Grunitzky

In The Last Supper I and II, Abdu’Allah engages in an exchange with classical art historical pieces which have also clearly influenced the history of photography. At first glance, the careful posing of the people in the photos creates a feeling of having documented a single moment in time.

When John E. Dowell Jr. sees cotton, he sees red. He sees labor—plantation slavery and all its attendant violences—the role it played in inventing Black Americans as a race of people, brutalizing ancestors physically, mentally, psychologically, fracturing family trees.

The physical violence of the harvesting practice and lived experience of enslavement, the psychic violence of dehumanization that extends past life into deaths marked by mass graves, the hypocrisy of churches and parks associated with a public good—these all haunt these cherished, seemingly innocuous public spaces.

Dowell sees this violence and its erasure. Sees the haints and saints and wants you to see them, too.

Dowell’s Central Park is Seneca Village. His Washington Square is a sacred burial ground, his New York City a plantation. Historic churches appear in the contemporary city on blood-saturated soil.

Dowell’s photos remind us of cotton’s role as a New York wealth generator by ensuring we see it as the grounds out of which these great institutions grew. Cotton is literal, figurative, and spiritual. It lies in fields, chokes Wall Street high rises, crowds the contemporary urban streets. It comes into focus, seemingly with arms and legs. It comes at you. It flies out of chimneys and church organ pipes, swirls about dreamy and menacing, and dares us to confront its soft and cutting histories.

Excerpt from “John Dowell’s Cotton”
By Brittany Webb

Fawundu’s series, Secrets, Traditions, Spoken and Unspoken Truths or Not, features the artist pictured in the embraces of her godmother (Passageways #1) and mother (Passageways #2)— women who have nurtured her all her life.

Each woman dons garments of cotton fabric made in Sierra Leone; some by Fawundu’s paternal grandmother and aunt, others by the hands of women who themselves were likely taught in the embrace of a woman who wanted to ensure a woman could endure.

How can a life be rendered from discrepant accounts? Gardenhire does not claim to speak for Eastman. Instead, much like a composer, he arranges this visual score to let Eastman—and by extension the hyper-visibility of Black men—project his own voice and vision out of the archive and into a more subjective being.

Excerpt from “A Matter of Rhythm”
By Patrick Bova

Deborah Jack's work powerfully re-centers our understandings of Black girlhood throughout the Caribbean and across the African diaspora. Reflecting tensions between innocence and maturity, departure and arrival, she evokes a journey of self-discovery and the remembering of a painful past.

Displaced, yet determined to resituate herself, the girl featured in what is the value of water, if it can’t quench our thirst for . . . is a perennial traveler in dialogue with the global, historical Caribbean.

Framing the question, what is the value of water, if it can’t quench our thirst for . . . reorients us around nourishing a Black body that has labored—a thirsty body, not a tourist body at rest. Intimately connected to the land and sea, the girl is heir to a brutal past both distant and immediate, and to an unknown future.

Caribbean girlhood moves from periphery to the center, and the girl is the subject who gazes outward, negotiating critical spaces in cross-cultural and trans-historical navigations.

Excerpts from “Caribbean Girlhood, Perennial Survivors and Shifting Shorelines”
By Oneka LaBennett

The artist Zoraida Lopez-Diago writes of her subject, “I found my mother, a recent immigrant from Panama during this period of the 1960s and 1970s, to be full of youthful vibrancy, endless possibilities, and adventure..”

The photograph’s title evokes the Greek Kronos, or God of time, something fleeting and precious for women of color. Time is a thief of certain ideals of beauty, good health, the opportunity to pamper one’s self, and moments to be adored by the camera.

People’s attempts to wrench dignity from indignity is squarely in the gaze of Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye, who uses his camera to draw us into presences and meanings that are abundantly in plain view but frequently hidden in our blind spots.

He pays attention to them, those communities vying not to be erased. And he looks at them with warmth and directness—in his photos, dignified faces stare straight at us, us at them—as he beckons us to see, too.

Excerpt from “Hands Up”
By Garnette Cadogan

Drawing with light amongst the shadows of Harlem, Ming Smith presents two women in her portraits Little Lil Kim and Pan Pan Lady (Betty). In one, a little girl who looks to be no more than four years old is anxious to grow up and in another, a woman, perhaps in her 80s, is poised at a diner counter.

One is brimming with the frenzy and vibrancy of youth, the other possesses a patience and stillness that comes with age. They could be the same woman, captured by the camera, suspended in time

Paired together, the images question the roles allotted for Black women, indicting the limiting myths about them. Like the women who wander the streets at night in McKay’s Harlem Renaissance poem, Little Lil Kim and the Pan Pan Lady navigate race, space, and gender between public and private realms.

She uses light to compose amongst dark shadows. And in the words of Gordon Parks, she “grasps them and gives eternal life to things that might well have been forgotten.” [1]

Excerpt from “Dress-up Play”
By Tao Leigh Goffe

[1] Maurice Berger, “A Photographer Who Made ‘Ghosts’ Visible,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017.

It's difficult to tell with Stan Squirewell’s series of painted photographs of Black men whether they are rising out of the dark waters beneath them or being inexorably swallowed up. They live on the edge of dissolution, their faces hidden, their bodies contorted in what might be a turning away or a turning toward the viewer.

Squirewell tells me that he wanted to bathe these subjects in blackness, and the idea of melanin—the biological pigment that occurs in us and in most organisms on the planet and which helps protect us from the harmful effects of UV radiation—gave him his primary motif.

Excerpt from “Between the Light and Dark”
By Seph Rodney

Whether bejeweled, nude, or sheathed in finery, each subject performs a conjured, delimited Blackness. Peering from shop windows or immersed in splendor, they beguile even as they connote conquest and servility.

Willis offers little judgment but her gaze provokes discomfort. The stereotype first seduces, then leaves us to wrestle with unreconciled ways of seeing that course through history.

Today, as boatloads of African migrants arrive and are turned away from Italy’s shores, the Blackamoors remain. Resilient captives of colliding histories, they recall other voyages— the sights and sounds of plunder and glory, that echo through time.

Excerpt from “In the Eye of the Beholder, the Burden of History”
By Pamela Newkirk