In New York, Okwui Enwezor's posthumous exhibition: a project on the pain of America's blacks

The last project of Okwui Enwezor (Calabar, 1963 - Munich, 2019), the great critic and curator who died prematurely in 2019, will be completed. Shortly before his death, Enwezor had envisioned a major exhibition on grief and mourning in American art, envisioning a gathering of some of the biggest names in contemporary the exhibition, which was nearly ready before Enwezor passed away, has been completed by four leading curators (Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash) and will be held at the New Museum in New York, January 27 to June 13, 2021, under the title Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.

The project dates back to 2018, when the New Museum invited Okwui Enwezor to curate an exhibition on the very theme of grief and mourning: at the time, the Nigerian-born critic was giving a series of talks at Harvard University focused on the relationships between black mourning and white nationalism in the United States and how these links emerge in the works of contemporary African American artists. Enwezor worked diligently on the project between the fall of 2018 and March 2019, putting his ideas on paper, compiling lists of artists and works, selecting the names of the authors who would write about the catalog, and engaging in discussions with many of the invited artists. So, since the exhibition was in a very advanced state of planning, the New Museum decided to get the job done, gathering a team of Enwezor’s collaborators and friends, including artist Glenn Ligon who had already been personally chosen by Enwezor as a collaborator on the project, and then again Mark Nash, a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and former co-curator of several of Enwezor’s motres, and Naomi Beckwith, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, whom Enwezor had chosen for his 2015 Venice Biennale. The team is completed by Massimiliano Gioni of Italy, artistic director of the New Museum: the four curators see the exhibition as a kind of tribute to Enwezor’s work and legacy.

The exhibition is presented as an intergenerational review that brings together thirty-seven different artists, working with a variety of techniques (there will be paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, videos, sound projections, and performances: all works mostly from the last decade and also some specially created for the project), and who in their practice have dealt with themes of mourning, remembrance, and loss, including in response to the racist violence suffered by black communities in America. The exhibition will then have a major focus on black grief and white mourning, both of which are seen as defining structures of social and political life in the United States today.

Enwezor’s idea was to open the exhibition close to the 2020 presidential election, as a response to the crisis in U.S. democracy and as a clear indictment of Donald Trump’s racist policies. And even though the Covid-19 pandemic forced the New Museum to postpone the exhibition’s opening date, the works included will include works that can address America’s present, past and future in a very strong way. For Enwezor, Grief and Grievance was one of the most personal and most political projects: indeed, mourning can be seen, according to the Nigerian curator, as a form of politics. “After the media normalization of white nationalism,” Enwezor wrote in his notes for the exhibition, “the last two years have made it clear that there is a new urgency, that of affirming the role that artists, through their works, have played in illuminating the violent contours of the American body politic.” The works in the exhibition, according to Enwezor, must in fact illustrate the idea that mourning is a practice that permeates the social, economic and emotional realities of life in African American communities.

The works in the exhibition focus on several themes: the Civil Rights Movement, police violence since the 1990s, today’s upheavals in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, and the history of African Americans and their segregation in particular, to paint a fresco of what Saidiya Hartman, author of one of the essays in the catalog, calls “the new life of slavery.” There will be three works that form the basis for the development of the narrative: Jack Whitten’s Birmingham (1964), Daniel LaRue Johnson’s Freedom Now, Number 1 (1963-1964) and Jean-Michel Basquiat ’s Procession (1986). There will also be space for performance and music as ways of grieving and remembering: works by Rashid Johnson, Okwui Okpokwasili, Tyshawn Sorey and others will speak to these themes. Another key theme of the exhibition will be the use of abstraction as a strategy for dealing with moments of historical violence or social uprisings: this is what artists such as Mark Bradford, Ellen Gallagher, Jennie C. Jones and Julie Mehretu. Then again there will bep ere by some of the most important artists in America today, such as Arthur Jafa, Theaster Gates, Kara Walker and several others. There will also be no shortage of reflections by younger artists.

Grief and Grievance will also be a way to historically contextualize the work of contemporary artists who deal with the themes of grief and mourning: the exhibition is thus meant to be proof that many of the issues that are discussed today around racism, discrimination, and violence are the result of processes far removed in time but which have not been analyzed and addressed with the necessary depth until now. As Enwezor himself suggested, black pain has been a national emergency for a long time, and several artists have therefore addressed it in their works.

To respect Enwezor’s wishes about the timing of the exhibition, the catalog will be published before the exhibition opens in the fall of 2020 and will feature contributions by Elizabeth Alexander, Naomi Beckwith, Judith Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Saidiya Hartman, Juliet Hooker, Glenn Ligon, Mark Nash, Claudia Rankine, and Christina Sharpe. For more information you can visit the New Museum website.

Image: Dawoud Bey, Fred Stewart II and Tyler Collins, from The Birmingham Project series (2012; prints on Dibond, 101.6 x 162.6 cm). © Dawoud Bey. Courtesy Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, and Rennie Collection, Vancouver.

In New York, Okwui Enwezor's posthumous exhibition: a project on the pain of America's blacks

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