#representation #WhitneyMuseum #EmmettTill #DanaSchutz #MartinBerger #race #civilrights So much hinges on the question of audience. Who is presumed to engage with artwork, and on what terms? In the museum, people of color so often feel that we are not the intended audience. The hurt that we experience on realizing that disconnect—that we are here for art but art is not necessarily here for us—has now been[…..]

In light of the current controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, today we’re re-reading Anu Vikram’s essay about the last Whitney Biennial, in which Joe Scanlan’s use of the fictional Black persona “Donelle Woolford” initiated a heated debate about representation, race, inclusion, and oppression. Vikram notes, “Scanlan’s decision to cast Black women as agents for his personal edification and creative expression […] supercedes concern for[…..]

“New struggles for civil and race rights continue to challenge and mine the unequal fields of representation within American political life.” So writes author Jordan Amirkhani, who explored this exhibition earlier in 2016, and connected these studio portraits from the late 1800s to current images from the Black Lives Matter movement. Today from our archives we consider Black visibility in culture and history. This article was originally published on May[…..]

After thirty years of the Guerrilla Girls presenting statistics that repeatedly show the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in public collections, museums, and galleries around the world, one would think that these institutions would have been driven to promote changes en masse, if only out of shame. Yet, as the New York–based feminist group keeps evidencing, the archaic status quo in the art world has proven[…..]

Since I took on the role of Executive Director of Daily Serving and Art Practical, working with an administrative staff of four fierce, intersectional, women-identified cultural producers, I have been asked to think and rethink what it means to work. Whom do we work for? What is our work, and most importantly, what world does it create? In the past month, I have witnessed the[…..]

Owing to the success of her figurative work as well as her 2012 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow is widely recognized for her uncanny mixed-media sculptures that incorporate cast body parts with everyday objects. Often overlooked, however, are her drawings of abstracted figures—erotic, restless, and vulnerable—though they are a central part of her practice. Human Landscape(s)[…..]

Curated by Dr. Andrea Andersson, Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible is the most extensive museum presentation of the artist’s work to date—a significant triumph for a cultural institution located in New Orleans, one of the most racially and politically fraught cities in the southern United States. While the exhibition’s rich display resonates with the variety of material and conceptual strategies at work in Pendleton’s oeuvre, it[…..]