For the past, present and future
24 VIEWS
Graphite on paper, 18x24”, 2019 – 2021 / next round 2030
During exhibition related programming, a speculative questionnaire from the year 3020 was distributed among viewers. In this universe, the United States has been consolidated into a super state loosely encompassing most of the Northern Hemisphere. Featured questions provided insight on a not so distant future impacted by climate change, space travel, artificial intelligence, debates over sentience, and new methods of racial categorization. Respondents were encouraged to push against this dystopia – what would they ask of the past? What would they ask of the future?
With support from Las Vegas Clark County Library District, Left of Center Gallery, Nevada Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, and UNLV’s Forgotten Song Research Award, 24 VIEWS expanded to include workshops and a web-based curatorial project at 24views.org.
FEBRUARY 2021 / [ *link to full essay coming soon* ]
This is a discussion about racial classification’s eventual collapse.
The colonial project – the white man’s burden to civilize us from our latent barbarism – was never fully laid to rest. It has in fact metastasized beyond comprehension in quieter ways. 18th century ideology predicated on “biological determinants” of superiority set into motion cascades of violence, exploitation, and cultural erasure that is still felt acutely in our most vulnerable communities across the world. In the United States, our shame is laid naked and bare across our cities; look only to the events of summer 2020 that moved people to protest in defense of Black life – the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and unfortunately many others – victims of police violence supported by systemic racism calcified into the foundation of American life. In sharp comparison, look to the events of January 6th and the blithe treatment of white insurrectionists storming the Capitol Building by force. Generations of race-based violence, segregation, and economic divestment make it clear that “the problem of the color line,” as described by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, is alive and well.
The problem of the color line is first and foremost a question of language. Language attempts to but never fully captures the magnitude of racialized existence. Writers and theorists – from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates – have combined urgent social critique with visceral, personal experience to expose the damning evidence of reparations unmet and humanity denied across all sectors of American life. However, language, with its infinite combinations of subject-predicate-object, can do little to bring the dead back to life. Yet I continue to believe in language’s ability to influence our understanding of the world. We shape our language, and our language shapes us. Through reciprocity, language leads to our remand and emancipation. Is it possible to alter the entire discourse on race through a linguistic shift in racial categories alone?
The issue is as much sociopolitical as it is ontological. To live in America as a person of color is to have an intuitive understanding of one’s proximity to, or occupation of, whiteness. In other words, it is an awareness of one’s distance from power.