From the Editor: Contemporary Art and The #Blacklivesmatter Movement

On February 14, 2015 I visited Titus Kaphar’s exhibition Asphalt and Chalk at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea, New York and was struck by the power and simplicity of two small canvases near the entrance, a diptych titled 1968/2014 (2014). On one panel a raised clenched fist, realistically rendered, has been all but obliterated by what appear to be rapidly applied expressionist strokes of white paint; on the other an open palm has been given a similar whiteout treatment. Both hands are black, and written in white paint at the bottom-right of the respective canvases are the numbers “68” and “14.” The exhibition features other larger paintings, such as Another Fight for Remembrance (2014), showing crowded scenes of black figures with hands raised and open against a dark night sky, their faces partially visible, obscured by the riot of glowing white paint. In all, these works give the impression of a struggle between an inchoate yet assertive whiteness bent on erasing the thoughtfully rendered, gesturing black bodies.

Although these paintings rehearse the painterly tactics we have come to associate with Kaphar’s pictorial archaeology of Euro-American art history and racial experience, they speak more directly to recent events in the United States, specifically the fatal shooting by police of the unarmed black youth from Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, on August 9, 2014. To be sure, Brown’s death at the hands of the police marks only one of several such incidents that occur with alarming frequency; but it touched an already raw nerve and set off a mass demonstration—and the occasional riot—such as the streets of America have not seen since the Los Angeles riots of 1992, following the acquittal of policemen caught on tape beating another black man, Rodney King.

Kaphar’s 1968/2014 and other paintings, commissioned by Time magazine in the wake of the Ferguson riots, are however not simply visual meditations on the Ferguson incident; rather they memorialize the radical public testifying to the reality and history of brutalization, especially of the black male, by state security agents and a reawakening of mass resistance to systemic oppression of blacks in America, despite the supposed gains of the civil rights movement and the now wishful arrival—after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008—of a postracial dawn. The diptych, in other words, collectively imagines the 2014 rallies in Ferguson and elsewhere around the United States, along with the passive die-ins in streets and on college campuses and the allied social-media phenomenon #BlackLivesMatter, as a contemporary reincarnation not only of the passive resistance of the mainstream civil rights movement, but also of the radical politics of the Black Power movement. However, whereas the iconic symbol of the Black Power movement was the black clenched fist, ever ready to deploy the same coercive violence the state claims as its prerogative, the open palm of Ferguson signifies, perhaps, present-day recognition that the oppressed, utterly at the mercy of state power, can still mobilize the force of collective moral outrage to wrest whatever rights and concessions they can from an insensitive and unjust system. Thus the juxtaposition of the two iconic hand gestures suggests a historical, and perhaps even ideological, connection between the events with which both are associated. However, the underlying premise of this work, as I understand it—that the 1960s dream for a more just society in which the color of one’s skin ceases to determine one’s fate and opportunities remains a dream deferred—raises an important question to contemporary art and artists: why the resounding silence in the face of the turmoil outside?

Back in the 1960s, when the mainstream, white art world was navel-gazing, lost in the reverie of aesthetic autonomy, many artists of color and diverse aesthetic and political persuasion in the United States took notice of the civil rights movement and asked searching questions about art’s relationship with social experience. Three distinct groups exemplified their different responses. First, the Spiral group, cofounded in 1963 by Romare Bearden in the wake of the March on Washington, convened in...