Culture, history, police brutality are themes
work, with pieces of the images tinted pink or blue. Among Hank Willis Thomas’ many works is a huge blue flag, an elongated cascade of cloth embroidered with over 15,000 stars marking the number of deaths from gun violence in the previous year.
There are many newly minted prints of classic Gordon Parks photographs depicting, with a seasoned professional’s eye, civil rights leaders and the movement they led in the '60s. A conceptual counterweight can be found in several key works by David Hammons, covering decades of rebellion and an ambiguous questioning of norms and stereotypes.
There are original Black Panther newsletters (with artwork by Emory Douglas) and two more recent Time magazine covers by Devin Allen that end up tying directly into Panther radicalism, as well as many other key photographs of protests and protesters. In the largest room you’ll find naturally epic works: a huge tire work by Jafa, adorned with chains and called “Big Wheel One” as a metaphor for labor rights, a wall-hung Paa Joe coffin in the shape of one of Africa’s slaveholding fortresses, and a library of books newly rebound in black, the titles in gold letters creating their own poetry from spine to spine.
The many parts of this show are not, to be sure, separable from the whole. The exhibition is the real artwork here, a mounting drumbeat with sounds and reverberations permeating every floor, viscerally and by association. Words and photographs dominate, almost inevitably, since these connect us to facts, but the paintings and sculptures are in many ways the aesthetic glue that lifts the whole—the show—into a realm of curatorial artistry.
“This Tender, Fragile Thing ” is not a history lesson of civil rights from MLK to BLM. It’s an art show. And that only compounds the impact and the fury. Something as simple as the wall-sized vinyl text work reading “8m 46s” by Nick Cave and Bob Faust drives home how much recent events have changed us. (Or changed me. If you don’t know what those numbers mean you really are obliged to see this show.) In the same way, we spot Malcolm X in photographs speaking, wordless in the gallery but audible anyway. We know his message, and we are reminded of true activism, by any means necessary.