“Without a way to name our pain, we are also without the words to articulate our pleasure,” wrote the cultural theorist bell hooks in 1992. Confronting the challenge of representing the complexities of contemporary Black experiences that hooks described, the artists in this gallery present works that cross the threshold between comfort and grief, and between personal narrative and collective space.
In the early 1980s Howardena Pindell asked pointed questions about the relationships between individual agency, public discourse, and the desire for freedom. In doing so, she put pressure on some of the blind spots of feminist and social justice movements of the previous decades. More recently, artists Diamond Stingily and Noah Davis have probed the ways that political and personal desires are always intertwined, suggesting that familiar spaces can be sites of both profound unease and charged intimacy.
Organized by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance.
