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About a week ago, Netflix released Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a mini-series unearthing the stories of the boys who became The Central Park 5. The Central Park jogger case against four African American teenagers and one Hispanic American teenager marks one of the worst instances of injustice against black children in legal history.[1]
On the 5th floor, after snaking through couples and floor-bound children, Bell’s series presents itself on a free-standing wall. From end-to-end, the wall hosts framed single-page excerpts of the New York Daily News with Bell’s critical edits. They reveal the most vitriolic statements made against the Central Park 5. She zooms in on the paper’s coverage of the boys and commands them to confess their sins in highlighter yellow.
Neighboring sections, blacked-out from stealing the viewer’s attention, lay next to commentary penned in red, pepper the margins. Each piece is quiet, but a stern, surgical exposure of what sociologist Joe Feagin calls the white racial frame. The white racial frame festers, as Feagin remarks, “through the institutions of cultural transmission –academia and faith communities, political discourse and media – and reinforced by a majority of white parents and peers.” It’s a frame that, boldly or quietly, positions “virtuous” whiteness against violent constructions of blackness. Among some of the bolder excerpts is the notorious ad commissioned by Trump that bludgeoned the boys with a rabid call to murder more black bodies. It’s a harrowing reminder of black imaginary within America society’s contemporary racial frame.
The work is a divergence from Bell’s more guerilla-style series: the large-scale wheat pastes following a similar methodology except clung to an edifice. These images reflect a size that is true to a newspaper and requires absorption from close-up. The sheer number of excerpts helps unify themes across the works but the placement, center of the exhibition floor and next to jarring sounds and flashing screens, start to drain its presence. Back on the bus, while juggling when I could catch a show between the program's jam-packed schedule and still eat, I still thought about the surroundings of Bell's work that ripped my attention away. I thought back to a week before the program started when I visited Hitching Their Dreams to Untamed Stars, an exhibition at the BMA showcasing the work beloved Baltimore-based artist Joyce J. Scott. She creates large-scale tapestry work featuring intricate weaving entangled in black history and African icons. Her work channels black experiences and elevates overlooked details in a way that parallels Bell’s work.
Miss Scott is a very different artist from Bell in medium, but what both exhibitions share are works that are best appreciated in fully-attentive meditation. Obviously, a solo exhibition can play more with space and curation to a level that would not be realistic at a biennial featuring seventy-five artists. At the BMA, Miss Scott’s breadth of work sits peacefully in a secluded gallery with walls painted in a deep reddish-purple hue that she’s often seen sporting. The challenge of propping up seventy-five of New York’s best artists while maintaining some impartiality in the display has unavoidable associated risks like overstimulation.
This year’s biennial has been accused of being melancholic, with critics calling its approach to radicality as “elegant but safe.” As if black and brown artists need to start engaging more grotesque work (like a certain unnamed artist that caused controversy in 2016), the criticism strikes as demanding more tap-dancing. I didn’t find radicality missing, although, perhaps, the show could’ve appeared more “radical” if radical gestures were able to breathe. I wonder, if Bell and the other black artists of the Biennial who are puncturing white walls with black thought were the focus of the biennial, would the exhibition appear more “challenging” to its critics?
After pushing through the (unsurprisingly) masochistic task of watching the first couple of episodes, I determined that I needed to see Alexandra Bell’s series No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter. ↩︎