‘Confronting Truths’ stirs up many questions
Chicago — It was just about a year ago. Michael Brown’s body was left face down on a street in Ferguson, Mo., his bright red Cardinals cap lying beside him and police officers standing idly by.
It was a deeply unsettling image. Combined with the stories of witnesses who said the unarmed black 18-yearold had attempted to surrender before being shot by a white cop, it reeked of a shameful history.
It was the iconography of indifference: a black body slain and white people going about their business.
This scene, which drew hundreds and then thousands of people to Ferguson, has been partially re-created in a gallery in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
The exhibit, “Confronting Truths,” features dozens of works by Ti-Rock Moore that address issues of racism, police brutality and white privilege. It has attracted international media coverage and drawn thousands to the gallery.
It has also inspired outrage from some because Moore is white. Some, like cultural critic Kirsten West Savali writing for “The Root,” poignantly and convincingly accuse the artist of re-victimizing Brown.
As a white woman, I was unsure what it might mean to stand over a sculptural replica of this young black man in a gallery. Would I be completing the scene, becoming that idle, white onlooker? Would it be a good thing to allow myself to be implicated in that way?
Or, was this a means to feel a satisfying outrage rather than to do something? Worse, did the context of a gallery turn Brown’s story into some kind of an entertainment or pastime? Even a little?
I thought a lot about whether I should even see the exhibit. I thought about how Brown’s father felt betrayed by its existence, though his mother attended the opening and has been supportive. (In a Nola.com article, Doug MacCash collates Brown’s parents’ responses to Moore’s exhibit: bit.ly/1EpfpvD.)
Part of the installation featuring Brown’s likeness we know by heart from our computer and TV screens. Surrounded by police tape, the body lies still before us.
Above the body on a large screen is video of Eartha Kitt as beautiful and fierce as I’ve ever seen her, weeping her way through the song “Angelitos Negros,” which gives the installation its title and much of its force.
“Painter, if you paint with love, paint me some black angels now,” she sings in the ’70s recording, seemingly to the whole of art history. “For all good blacks in heaven, painter show us that you care. .... How come you don’t paint our skin if you put love in your heart?”
To just read these lyrics on the page you will miss the complex concoction of emotions Kitt embodies in the installation. It’s been lingering in my head for days, and I can’t entirely make it out. She seems to be inviting, insisting even, on her due from art and artists. Yet there is a grief and defiance, too.
There is a memorial quality to Moore’s installation, to be sure. No one was in the gallery when I was there. I sat down on the floor and looked at the muscular arms, the baby-fat-like ripples at the back of the neck.
Michael Brown and Ferguson felt a million miles away at that moment. Perhaps that’s the point, or some part of it. This was an art object. I was reminded of art’s limitations, especially when it comes to expressing anything about injustice or war. The history of art is littered with failed attempts by great artists.
Hurricane inspired artist
This one work of art has received so much attention that it’s eclipsed the rest of the show. Moore, a New Orleans-based artist whose real name is not Ti-Rock, has been making art for much of her life but is new to showing it publicly. The government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina set her on the path to make this kind of work, she says.
“I watched my fellow New Orleanians abandoned, thirsty, hungry, desperate and dying,” she wrote in an email interview. “What I knew then, as I know now, is that if that had been a bunch of white folk, things just would not have gone down the same way!”
Her target, she says, is a privileged, white audience, people like herself. She uses blunt force and direct, familiar symbols. No one will miss the references.
Many works feature American flags, shredded, turned upside down, painted black, lined with the faces of black inmates or inscribed with derogatory terms for AfricanAmericans. One work weaves a Confederate flag with an American one and bears the names of the nine shooting victims from the historic church in Charleston, S.C.
A neon piece that spells out “chokehold” uses a noose in place of the O. The artwork links the history of slavery to the death of Eric Garner, whose death and last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for protests against police brutality.
The show is overcrowded and repetitive, which does an injustice to the work, and at times reminiscent of other artists. The neon works, for instance, are less potent versions of what African-American artist Glenn Ligon has been doing for years.
Still, as I write this, news stories reference the anniversary of Brown’s death, violence has erupted in Ferguson again and a church banner that read “Black Lives Matter” was defaced here in Hartland.
I can’t help but think that deeply awkward expressions about race involving white people are better than none.
In his preface for Michelle Alexander’s book about the mass incarceration of black men, “The New Jim Crow,” African-American scholar Cornel West reminds us that Martin Luther King Jr. called us to be lovestruck with each other.
Moore is lovestruck. Perhaps overly so. It is a forgivable sin. She is not a great artist, not yet at least, but I was challenged by aspects of this show and there are moments within it that make me want to pay attention to what Moore does next.
“Confronting Truths” is on view through Thursday at Gallery Guichard, 436 E. 47th St., Chicago. The gallery, which exhibits art of the African Diaspora and is owned by African-American artists Andre and Frances Guichard, is hosting a closing reception and panel discussion on Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m. For more information: gallery guichard.com.