Notes:
“These images of black men and black women should speak on many levels, calling to mind in the viewer a range of issues and concerns.”
“She wants me to tell her how to respond to the work because she assumes that the only legitimate response is guilt in the face of perceived rage.”
I found this to be an interesting part of the interview where Weems is discussing a buyer for a few of her pieces. The brief interaction that she had with this woman was that the work must be channeled through anger and so the only legitimate response is that of white guilt. But the woman when perceiving this work did not feel that and wanted Weems to be told how to respond. And often there are people looking to others about how they should interact with art instead of simply interacting and reacting to it.
So on Sunday, I went with my partner to go to a museum! Initially we were going to some of the galleries in Chelsea but then I realized that the 2 I was interested in (Gagosian and Sean Kelly which were displaying two of my favorite photographers, Tyler Mitchell and Dawoud Bey) were closed Sunday and Monday. Instead we went to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which I discovered from a professor last semester was free for anyone 25 years or younger thanks to a donation. On display there were various artists but we were only able to see about 3 floors with the time that we had because when we arrived the fire alarm went off… so we had to wait for the fire department to come and reset the alarm.
- Black people living in exiles, which makes us imagine home and journeys of return
- Journey through time is prevalent in Weems’ work
- Home is where you find it
- Home both mysterious and mythic
- Blackness/gender/femininity/desire and power
- Black subjects utilized to address universal concerns
- Interrogate the notions of beauty
- “…the lens of a colonizing gaze…”
- The images are a form of resistance against colonization
“These images of black men and black women should speak on many levels, calling to mind in the viewer a range of issues and concerns.”
The point addressed throughout this interview several times that I found to be most interesting was the narrative of a the white subjects are the universal subject. This to me put into perspective the way that we as BIPOC are trained through, as said in the interview,”the colonizing gaze”, and how for many this is the norm. We are taught that if black bodies are represented in mass that it is due to the fact that is challenging some notion of hatred, racism, etc and not for the simple fact that they are there to be representatives. Often we are used to the idea of placing ourself in the image of a white person in a movie, but when it is an all black cast the notion is now different.
“She wants me to tell her how to respond to the work because she assumes that the only legitimate response is guilt in the face of perceived rage.”
I found this to be an interesting part of the interview where Weems is discussing a buyer for a few of her pieces. The brief interaction that she had with this woman was that the work must be channeled through anger and so the only legitimate response is that of white guilt. But the woman when perceiving this work did not feel that and wanted Weems to be told how to respond. And often there are people looking to others about how they should interact with art instead of simply interacting and reacting to it.
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| Our visit to The Whitney |
We took the stairs at first while they were trying to fix the elevators, and I’m glad about that because of what we saw!
This is an installation piece created by Christine Sun Kim titled,”A String of Echo Traps, 2022” and is part of the larger series of work she has on display titled All Day All Night Long. And this series of through cubes was truly entrancing because of how it radiated this light and darkness, it also emanated this sound that my partner and I could only describe as warm and clean. It is important to note that we read her artist statement and Kim is deaf, so she primarily speaks ASL and can also write in English.
The next part of her exhibit that is on the 3rd floor is a series of charcoal drawings with shapes and words saying things like point, owe, and other words. These were placed along the walls that were painted with similar black shapes. It was apparent throughout her works that Kim wanted to challenge notions of perception of deafness and to highlight the interactions she has with people that are not HOH or deaf.
Some other works that we interacted with were on the next floor available, floor six these works were under the Shifting Landscapes series. Some of the work that caught my eye was the ones that were primarily about New York and its perception over the years.
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| Martin Wong Big Heat, (1986) |
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| Jane Dickson Heading in - Lincoln Tunnel 3, 2003 |
This piece is way more cool in person and my phone camera could not capture that. Seeing this piece out of the corner of my eye had me so excited to engage with it when going around the room. At first I thought this was small globs of paint, but it is actually painted turf aka plastic grass. The greenness of this piece in real life is mesmerizing and I’m not sure of the implications of this piece but again I love texture.
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| Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani 2 Lizards, 2020 |
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