Relating Racism into Art
Nina Chanel Abney’s striking painting Class of 2007 (2007), which she based on her art school class where she was the only African-American student. Abney takes the group of students and reverses the races of everyone, painting her classmates in orange prison garb and herself as a white prison guard. “The artists take material, whether it’s visual, whether it’s auditory, whether it’s something theatrical and they use the subject of their world,” says Thomas. “The fact that it is done as art, we are hoping that the experience is transformative”
Open Casket By Dana Schutz. “It is one of the most powerful images to emerge from the racism that infected the southern states of America in the 1950s – the photograph of a badly beaten 14-year-old boy, lynched after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, lying in a funeral casket.”
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014 (All rights reserved/Courtesy David Zwirner, London) “The blackness of my figures is supposed to be unequivocal, absolute and unmediated,” Marshall explains. “They are a response to the tendency in the culture to privilege lightness. The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.”