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BLACK SHIELD _JSMA BLM ARTIST GRANT EXHIBITION
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Featured Artists:
AnAkA, Annabelle Araya, Julia Bond, J’reyesha Brannon, Amirah Chatman, Steven Christian, Baba Wagué Diakité, Sadé DuBoise, Austin Gardner, Leila Haile, Elijah Hasan, Edmund Holmes, Willie Little, Latoya Lovely, Aiyana Monae McClinton, Jessica Mehta, Christine Miller, Annie Schutz, Sharita Towne, and Kyra Watkins
Introduction:
The Black Lives Matter Artist Grant Program is a multi-university granting project established by Jordan Schnitzer that has awarded funding to 60 emerging, mid-career, and established artists whose practices demonstrate a commitment to social justice. This granting initiative, which categorically references the Black Lives Matter movement(s), gestures towards the germinating financial and intellectual investment in artwork borne out of a continuing, centuries-long fight for Black autonomy, freedom, and most notably, life.
At first blush we might make assumptions about what an exhibition concerned with the finer points of anti-Blackness would yield. If entering the galleries with a predetermined (see also: singular and unwavering) expectation of the ways ‘Black Lives Matter’ should be represented visually, sonically, and conceptually, the audience will likely miss an opportunity to wholly engage with the expansiveness captured in the practices of Black and Indigenous artists. It is paramount that while viewing the exhibition that we examine the role art and artists play in pushing forward, challenging, and morphing movements. While a single object cannot change the course of our present-tense, artists often act as our record keepers, illustrators, documentarians, and architects, making clear to us who we are, where we are, and ultimately, where we are headed. Whether we like it or not.
The 20 artists selected for the Portland State University award cycle stretch the notion of ‘socially engaged artwork’ beyond its cursory definition, resulting in a collection of objects which require multiple shifts in perspective. Through installation, photography, video, painting, performance, textiles, sculpture, poetry, and printmaking, this exhibition is a microcosm of allied and conflicting political, social, and aesthetic approaches. Within this larger web, there are two especially generative throughlines that are working in the background. The first is a desire to confront and reveal the lasting roots of systemic racism, the second is the conceptualization of Blackness beyond monolithic and Eurocentric understandings and articulations.
Earthly and fantastical, explicit and unfixed, the Black Lives Matter Artist Grant Exhibition speaks to a breadth of interpretation and imagination, of ideological and formal tensions in how artists illustrate identity and lived experience. Some awardees find it imperative to use art as a vehicle to depict the horrors of white supremacy by swelling the effects to an unignorable size, asking their audience not to turn away. These artworks are a means of intervening the quiet, mundane museum visit and exercising the artists’ capacity to bring light to oft-ignored injustices that impact every aspect of Black lives—down to how we experience art. The artwork of other awardees tends to the intricacies of their individual craft, or the richness of material culture. To joy and pleasure, illustrating and narrating a better world than this, to the intersections of Blackness, indigeneity, and queerness, to secrecy, and to abstraction. Though it is a conscious decision to avoid rendering the violence or policing intrinsic to whiteness for several artists, there are many whose conceptual and formal practices simply have nothing to do with these matters. Noting these differences is not to create or reinforce a binary, but rather to explore the plentiful ways artists are utilizing their practices to make sense of their individual and shared understanding of what Black Lives Matter means in 2021.
This exhibition is not only in the wake of a global pandemic, nor the two years of increased global uprisings and protests in defense of Black life, or even centuries of enslavement and imprisonment, but also; in the spirit of Black creativity, ingenuity, and collectivity.
Text written by Ella Ray, editorially supported by Nia Pipkin-Glover