…American society has proven itself capable of maintaining in both sophisticated and brutal ways a most emphatic form of race-based social distancing. Whilst physical forms of social distancing have become part of a ‘new normal’ since COVID-19, de facto racialised forms of social distancing – in housing, jobs, education and the judicial system – have long been intrinsic to American society. Policies intended to instil equality, such as affirmative action, have been proven to be unfit for purpose, compounding rather than diminishing inequity.
But social distance is a useful metaphor to think about the relationships between American and African American art, and art institutions and African American art. The ‘art of social distance’ is anything but a ‘new normal’. It usefully describes underlying politics which continue to modulate, in spoken and unspoken ways, racial delineations in American art. How can these unprecedented times, the era of Black Lives Matter, influence the art of social distance?
Seemingly every sector of American society has expressed anger and revulsion at the recent police murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. From the car industry and technology firms to sportswear brands and record labels, statements of solidarity with African Americans have come thick and fast from corporate America. Likewise, museums and galleries across the US have added their voices to a growing tide of protest. The Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, have spoken against ‘police brutality and institutional and structural racism’ and of how ‘museums cannot claim neutrality in addressing the horrific issues that have plagued our society for centuries’…
…And yet there is a schism between the deference now bestowed on African American art and the harsh everyday realities of African American people: recognition, historical correction and progress on one hand, inertia, inequality and brutality on the other. There is little doubt that in terms of profile and visibility African American art is in a better place than thirty years ago. Its presence is noted not only in exhibitions both in the US and internationally but it is also more widely collected, written about and studied. In these troubling times, the institutional embrace of African American art contrasted with the martyrdom of black life carries even greater significance. This is nothing new. David Hammons’s Injustice Case (1970) or Elizabeth Catlett’s The Black Woman Speaks(1970), were made in and were the products of traumatic periods…
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