Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America
“The most ambitious exhibitions help to usher in new ways of seeing,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. Curator Okwui Enwezor, who died at 55 before seeing “Grief and Grievance” realized, excelled at assembling such shows: “If you saw them or even read about them, you knew you were seeing the shape of future conversations about art.” Before cancer took his life, the Nigerian-born Enwezor envisioned an exhibition that would express what he called the “crystallization of black grief” that emerged in response to the recent rise of the politics of white grievance. Grief turns out to be a rich subject—because grief remains “fundamentally a psychological phenomenon,” with no straight line from the privacy of grief to community.
That helps explains why so much of the work is abstract or incorporates music.
With 37 artists represented, including Kara Walker, Theaster Gates, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the exhibition feels “polyphonic, layered, and in many ways cathartic.”
Enwezor’s successors easily could have gotten by just on the fame of the artists, said
Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Instead, the exhibition “will surely rank as one of the most important of 2021,” with a “volatile chemistry” that’s evident before you even enter. Hanging on the museum’s front in illuminated letters is a three-word phrase, “blues blood bruise,” chosen by artist Glenn Ligon to allude to a teenager’s account of having been beaten by police during the 1964 Harlem riots. Inside, such allusiveness is common. Terry Adkins’ contributions are his ghostly X-ray photos of “memory jugs”—stoneware vessels that African-American families filled with mementos and left on loved ones’ gravestones. Later, bright, busy paintings by Julie Mehretu and Mark Bradford at first appear beyond mourning. But then you realize that Bradford’s work traces the contours of a map that was used to plan government surveillance of black neighborhoods following the 1965 Watts riots, and that Mehretu’s includes a drawn image from 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“It’s worth noting that there’s little explicit address to white racism, white guilt, or, really, white anything,” said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. Most of the work emphasizes patterns of feeling that attend the experience of being black in America, and “the predominant result is poetic rather than argumentative.” Even one of the most political efforts, a 2012 Dawoud Bey photo series that pays homage to the victims of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., haunted me long after I left. This is a show that “touches on shared human needs and capacities,” which makes it universally resonant. Sharing sorrows and strategies for coping won’t repair the world. Still, “it’s a start.”