Review: Art and Activism One Year Later: Exhibits at the Indiana State Museum and Gallery 924
It’s been a year since the Murals for Racial Justice initiative kicked into gear as a way to bring local Black artists and business owners together after rioting downtown left dozens of damaged storefronts and broken windows in downtown Indianapolis.
Both Response: Images and Sounds of a Movement at the Indiana State Museum and Art and Activism: One Year Later at Gallery 924 are part of a partnership between the Indiana State Museum, The Indianapolis Public Library, and Gallery 924 honoring the one-year anniversary of the program.
The former highlights the 24 artists who created 22 murals on plywood to cover the broken windows and help the city heal as part of the Murals for Racial Justice program. The latter highlights artwork of artists inspired by, and reacting to, the social justice movement that arose after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.
The postcard image from the Art and Activism: One Year Later exhibition at Gallery 924 features a detail from the painting “American Duality” by Israel Solomon. You see two juxtaposed depictions; a scene of police confronting protesters at Monument Circle and a scene of passersby strolling leisurely or playing along the downtown Canal Walk. In the Monument Circle depiction, it’s worth noting who’s confronting the police and who’s on the sidelines.
“American Duality” by Israel Solomon
“American Duality” gives the figurative finger to the oft-expressed notion that art should be exclusively for art’s sake, and not be chained to any moral or didactic purpose. Nonetheless, there is plenty in this painting and others to admire in terms of technique and artistic vision. Inseparable from Solomon’s clear social message — that the city and its police are experienced differently by different social groups — is Solomon’s bold use of color and his use of geometric shapes to build figures and backgrounds.
At 924 you’ll find Clayton Hamilton’s three provocative and thoughtful acrylic on plywood sign paintings (evocative of the phrases he’s painted on a foot-high cement retaining wall just north of 38th and College Ave for the past decade). One of the signs, against a red, white, and blue background reads, “our blood … your rules … and we sho’ is.” Consider the placement of the text against the colors and the meanings that open up when you contrast them. Part agitprop and part high art, it recalls the Robert Indiana painting “HOPE” — in white letters against a red and blue background, in the style of his iconic “LOVE” series.
“Fractured Freedom … Shattered Hope”, “Self Explanatory”, and “Know History” by Clayton Hamilton
“Hope” is the title of Regina Bunting’s exquisitely-detailed portrait of a young Black man wearing a golden crown, with eyes closed, dreaming of the future perhaps. Yet there is an indeterminate quality to the abstract and mostly grayscale background that perhaps leaves the future as an open question.
Jaidly Anciso’s “Cucumber Pickers” portrays Hispanic seasonal workers in the field and a crop-duster biplane flying towards the subjects in the foreground. As the plane may just be about to unleash a load of insecticide on the workers, you wonder if the workers will matter enough in the pilot’s calculations about whether (or not) to dust. Considering everything else going on here, the American flag painted on the side of the barn presents in a decidedly ambiguous way.
“Cucumber Pickers” by Jaidly Anciso
The call for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which prompted so many to the streets last summer, is part and parcel of the works on display here. Wildstyle Paschall’s photography grounds the exhibition in a specific time and a place: May 6, 2020 at 62nd and Michigan Streets. It was at this intersection -- on that day and in that place -- that Dreasjon Reed was killed by an IMPD officer.
Anthony Radford’s collage/construction “Storytime Boys and Girls” (Once upon a time in Amerikkka) reaches from the present back to 1619, when the first African slaves arrived on North American shores. It not only features various photos of injustice heaped out to Blacks in America during the past 400 years but also features the text of a speech of one Willie Lynch, a British slave owner who delivered it on the banks of the James River in the colony of Virginia in 1712 to other slave owners who were gathered at the river to talk shop.
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap between the Response: Sound and Images exhibit at the Indiana State Museum and the exhibition at Gallery 924, the former which has six murals on display. But the overlap was not only in terms of theme. A number of Murals for Racial Justice artists (Shadé Bell, Mathew Cooper, Rebecca Robinson, and Israel Solomon among them) had work on display at Gallery 924.
The exhibition includes six full size murals including Mechi Shakur’s entire eight-panel plywood mural titled “Black Lives Don’t Matter”, that originally appeared at 140 W. Washington Street, which pictures a police car driving over a word cloud full of the names of African Americans who lost their lives in acts of police violence and also running over freedom and equality in the process.
“Black Lives Don’t Matter” by Mechi Shakur
Gary Gee’s “We the People”, originally displayed at 32 W. Washington St., is a stylized depiction of a diverse cross-section of protesters against police brutality in downtown Indy. It also features part of the preamble to the Constitution, “WE THE PEOPLE HOLD THESE TRUTHS 2 BE SELF-EVIDENT” contrasting these words to the words on the signs they are holding, “I Can’t Breathe”, “Black Lives Matter, and “Justice 4 Breonna Taylor” among them.
The exhibition also features recorded interviews with muralists and with Danicia Monet, project director for the Murals for Racial Justice initiative. For Monet, the problems the murals address go beyond the death of George Floyd, and even beyond police brutality directed at African Americans to the problem of representation.
“Our city went through a huge wound and is still healing from a huge wound, of many wounds,” Monet says in the recorded interview. “America does not exist without blackness. America does not exist without Black people. There's not enough Black vernacular on the public space, on the public realm, on built spaces, on buildings and architecture on storefronts, in design schemes. And once again, if you're walking around a community if you're existing in a city where you don't see yourself, what does that tell you about yourself? That you're not valued, that you don't belong, that we don't want you here.”
For Monet, the existence of systemic racism in the U.S. is axiomatic. But it is certainly not axiomatic for the talking heads on Fox News. That is, the exhibits at the State Museum and at Gallery 924 are taking place during what appears to be a growing backlash against the Black Lives Matter Movement engineered by right wing tastemakers and influencers.
The week after these exhibits opened, the state of Florida banned the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) — an academic lens which examines how race and the law intersect in the U.S. — in its schools. This ban will make it more likely that teachers will be punished if they even mention race in the classroom, since CRT has been redefined on the right to include any mention of race that makes white people uncomfortable. Other states are following suit, not only with attempts to proscribe the teaching of critical race theory but attempts to make it more difficult for African Americans to vote.
Will this backlash grow and take aim not only at high school teachers teaching about Jim Crow laws and George Floyd in history class but also at socially-engaged artists who receive state funding or create art in public places?
No matter what happens, the Murals for Racial Justice Initiative artists and those represented at Gallery 924 will continue to do more than just create art for art’s sake.
“I hope it makes people uncomfortable,” Mechi Shakur told NUVO’s Kyle Herrington last year, talking about his mural, “Black Lives Don’t Matter.” “I hope dialogue comes from it, conversations that need to be had. Nothing really changes, nothing can really change unless the people that have power are uncomfortable. If they’re comfortable and have no worries in the world, they don’t really take the time to look down on other people’s problems that don’t affect them.”
‘Art and Activism’ runs at Gallery 924 through July 23 and ‘Response: Images and Sounds of a Movement’ runs through Sept. 6 at the Indiana State Museum. Both exhibits are free and open to the public. Check websites for times.
