CURATORIAL STATEMENT

"Artistic Floodlights" is a consolidated digital archive of six exhibitions that effectively changed the institutional and art historical canon through their attention to what and who have gone missing over time. This site seeks to highlight vigorous, creative approaches artists and scholars have taken to find ways to make the invisible visible. The site also seeks to offer an enduring and engaging digital mirror for these temporary exhibitions that made such a lasting impact on the United States art world.  

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In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Thelma Golden, the current director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “Yes, things are better. What we need to continue to understand is that the exhibition and collection of this work is not a special initiative, or a fad, but a fundamental part of museums’ missions — and that progress is not simply about numbers, but understanding this work, in the context of art history and museum practice, as essential.”

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As museums, other types of art institutions, and scholars across America work to rebalance and augment their collections and scholarship to include deeply important artworks, artists, and subjects that were overlooked and dismissed due to the United States’ systemic racism and sexism, artists and scholars Carrie Mae Weems, Kerry James Marshall, Jason Moran, Norman Lewis, Denise Murrell, Ruth Fine, and Dorothy Moss have already created entire bodies of work that comment on these stark absences.

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Would the progress we have seen and the call to action the power players in America’s art world are responding to be possible without the groundwork these artists and scholars laid? I believe this group of activists, in their probing “what could have been,” effectively carved out of the western art canon’s white Carrara marble a new, black “what is.”

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The first exhibition featured is the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts’ 2015-16 "Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis." We start with this, the first extensive retrospective of Lewis’ work in a major institution, because Lewis was, for all intents and purposes, prescient with regard to the issues surrounding his representation as an African-American artist. In 1979, as he was dying of cancer, he made a prediction to his family, which was published just a few years ago in the New York Times: “He said to us, ‘I think it’s going to take about 30 years, maybe 40, before people stop caring whether I’m black and just pay attention to the work.’” At exactly 36 years after his death, his survey at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts proves his prediction was spot on.  

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Lewis was an extraordinarily vital figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement. An already avant-garde genre, Lewis took the art form even further by interpolating symbolism of jazz, police brutality, and political activism in his work, centering the black experience in a way that was intentional and unapologetic. Alongside other Abstract Expressionists, his work reflects the transition from representational to abstract, and he continuously produced paintings at the level of the white Abstract Expressionists who now continually sell at the very top in auction.

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The second exhibition highlighted is a survey of another artist who ups the ante in his “unapologetic” approach to representing blackness, Kerry James Marshall. His singular use of ebony black for every figure in every painting takes the centrality of the black figure to a new level, functioning as a symbolic demand to be seen and an allegory for what has been overlooked. The retrospective of his work, titled "Mastry," and originally curated by Helen Molesworth for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, traveled around the country as a blockbuster hit. This level of visibility for Marshall and for the black figure was long overdue, but nonetheless massively impactful for black artists working in the United States. It was equally significant for American museum professionals and curators who swiftly realized the work they had cut out for them in expanding their collections and moving beyond their sporadic “token” exhibitions.

The third exhibition in the archive focuses on art historical absence in an innovative and striking way—Denise Murrell’s exhibition "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" centers the models in major works of art who have gone, jarringly and overtly, overlooked in art scholarship. She focuses the entire show on black subjects and their stories, reclaiming their positions in history and in the relationships they had with the well-known artists who painted them.  

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The fourth exhibition, which is currently on view, is a part of the Guggenheim’s "Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection."  One of the six artists, Carrie Mae Weems, responded to the invitation to curate a selection of works by addressing “What Could Have Been?” A photographer and performance artist who is renowned for beautifully staged portraits of black men and women that comment on contemporary life, Weems decided to address the collection’s absence of artists and subjects of color by limiting the color palette of her exhibition to black and white, an approach that is in dialogue with Kerry James Marshall’s sole use of jet black paint as a statement. This is not the first project Weems has undertaken to address what is missing in art institutions. She took the institution on quite literally in the “Museum Series,” which includes the artist as a staffage figure walking toward major western art museums throughout the world. As a black artist walking toward the white institutions, she is asking a question of representation, and demanding a response.

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The fifth exhibition, also currently on view, "Jason Moran," another solo show, at the Whitney Museum of American Art addresses what has gone missing in a decidedly novel approach. A composer, musician, painter, and conceptual artist, Jason Moran’s body of work is one of many facets and collaborations. This exhibition marks the first time all three of Moran’s “Staged” installations are on view together. The “Staged” series addresses an absence of another kind—the African American cultural landmark. Moran said, "I love playing music from the past, but considering America's desire to raze cultural landmarks, why not fabricate those spaces as well? Architecture continues to inform music, from the big bands of the Savoy Ballroom, to the small groups at the Three Deuces. From the vast ballroom to the tiny stage."

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The sixth exhibition deviates from tradition even further. "IDENTIFY: Performance Art as Portraiture" is a series of performances at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington curated as an intervention. The performances center the missing stories on the museum’s walls due to the history of portraiture favoring the white and wealthy. Beginning in 2016 with a performance by Maria Magdalena Campos Pons “IDENTIFIED,” this series continues today with performances planned throughout 2020.

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