Last June, to raise awareness to police brutality and racial injustice after George Floyd was murdered by white officer Derek Chauvin, music executives Brianna Agyemang, Platoon's senior artist campaign manager, and Jamila Thomas, Senior Director of Marketing at Atlantic Records, organised a protest accompanied by the hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused.
The initiative then developed into the #BlackOutTuesday protest, a social media campaign that invited the public to post black squares on Instagram.
Chicago-based visual artist and architect Amanda Williams, well-known for her "Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line)" project in collaboration with educator Andres L. Hernandez and interdisciplinary artist and hairstylist Shani Crowe at the U.S. Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, joined the social media protest campaign in solidarity, but she felt the initiative was not enough.
Was posting one black screen all that she could have done to express her pain and sorrow, honour Black communities and tell their stories? "I'll be honest. I wasn't feeling the blackout. I hate stuff like that, but I caved. Wanted to be in solidarity. But color is everything to me. You can't just say 'black'...which one?" Williams recently stated.
Since then Williams decided to develop a wider personal project to challenge the black square as a monolithic representation of the rich narratives and histories that inform Black identity.
Moving from her past work exploring color theory, during the months that followed Williams posted on her Instagram page images showing different Black shades or dark textures and surfaces to bring to people's attention one key issue - the plurality, complexity, and nuances of Black experience(s).
The project became for the artist and architect a way to ponder on racism, individualism, environmentalism and wellness and to explore how they shape people's civic and civil ideals.
Williams has by now posted over 100 images and the project has just gone from digital to physical with an event that launched yesterday at New York's Storefront for Architecture (97 Kenmare Street), as part of On Maintenance, Storefront's interim program organised in the midst of the global pandemic to address key issues such as care, spaces and social and political systems.
"What Black Is This, You Say?" is a public artwork for Storefront's facade: Williams' installations, paintings and works on paper are deviced as ways to raise questions about the state of urban space and ownership in America and the artwork on Storefront's facade is set to be an in-depth investigation of twelve colours and experiences.
Each of them will be painted on the twelve moving panels of the gallery's facade that serve as hinges between the public realm and the gallery interior. The work constitutes a permanent and physical transformation of a space, but the programme linked with the visual project is instead a way to transform visitors and their perceptions and knowledge of Black culture, narratives and experiences.
Each month from until May 2022, a new shade will explored through images and memories from the artist, plus commissioned texts from artists, writers, and cultural figures and public submissions.
The programme will developed over a year: for the next two weekends there will be collective painting sessions with Williams' virtual participation at Storefront, while the virtual programme will be launched on the dedicated site "What Black Is This, You Say?" the beginning of June with an event featuring Amanda Williams in conversation with artist Cauleen Smith.
In this way, while people in New York will be able to join the painting sessions, the virtual sessions will allow us all to discover the project and educate ourselves.
In addition to this public artwork at Storefront, Williams is also taking part in two events organized by The Museum of Modern Art ( MoMA) in New York - "Embodied Sensations" and "Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America".
The former, on view in The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium (until June 20th, 2021) is an interactive project and participatory artwork questioning public space, power, social and physical immobility, equality and inequality during the global pandemic and invites visitors to consider the isolation many people lived in the past year because of Coronavirus and compare it to the lack of inclusion marginalised communities have always felt in their lives.
"Reconstructions" is instead a collective exhibition exploring the ongoing impact of anti-black racism on the shaping of architecture and the built environment. Williams' piece, "We're Not Down There, We're Over Here", is presented alongside ten other newly commissioned works by architects, designers, and artists that explore ways in which erased histories can be made visible and equity can be built.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.