{"id":18614,"date":"2024-01-04T18:09:28","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T18:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=18614"},"modified":"2024-01-04T19:06:17","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T19:06:17","slug":"race-whiteness-and-absence-in-studio-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18614","title":{"rendered":"Race, Whiteness, and Absence in Studio Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This paper grew out of \u201cThe Color of Joy: Rethinking Critical Race Visual Culture,\u201d a panel discussion at the 2021 College Art Association Annual Conference. The panel was organized by crystal am nelson and Michelle Yee who invited me to discuss my work, which has engaged with issues of race and racial formation for over two decades but is more often associated with trauma than joy, and so I welcomed the panel\u2019s pairing of critical race visual culture with BIPOC1<\/a><\/sup> cultural practices. At that time I also knew I wanted to revisit my 2018 billboard project in light of the then-recent 2021\u2009US Capitol attack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here I will draw from several bodies of my work, including two series, Erased Lynching<\/em> and Profiled<\/em>, and an exhibition entitled Unseen: Our Past in a New light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar<\/em>, ending with my Constellations<\/em> series, to share the different ways in which my exploration of race, whiteness, and absence have informed my practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Erased Lynching Series<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On the morning of January 7, 2021, I was watching news coverage on the previous day\u2019s attack on the United States Capitol and was instantly reminded of the historic images of lynching that I had studied for so many years. News clips on that day repeatedly showed thousands of protesters as they transformed into a frenzied mob and gave far-right groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters national attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around noon on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump falsely asserted to a crowd of supporters on the National Mall that the recent presidential election had been stolen. He further incited the crowd when he said, \u201cWe fight like hell and if you don\u2019t fight like hell, you\u2019re not going to have a country anymore.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> It was then that thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, disrupted lawmakers, and attempted to overturn Trump\u2019s defeat in the 2020 election. The world watched in horror as democracy teetered on the brink of destruction. Makeshift gallows were erected. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress had their offices looted and vandalized. Staff members hid under tables and locked doors for safety. In the end, five people died and more than 140 were injured.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was in the middle of selecting images for the panel presentation and knew I had to begin with a 2006 image from the Erased Lynching<\/em> series that appeared as a billboard in 2018. I had added the words \u201cdemocracies can fail\u201d to the right of the image for the billboard presentation after I heard these words spoken by former President Obama at an event in Los Angeles. The billboard was one of 300 designed by artists and activists as part of the 50 State Initiative, which was a national effort to get people out to vote and took place in the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. This massive project was organized and implemented by the artist collective For Freedoms, founded by artists Hank Willis Thoma and Eric Gottesman \u201cto model and increase creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photograph on the billboard depicts a mob after they had lynched Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes, two white men, in Saint James Park in San Jose, California on November 26, 1933.5<\/a><\/sup> As with other images in the Erased Lynching<\/em> series (over sixty images), I removed the victims and the ropes from archival images of lynching as part of an artistic strategy to draw the viewer\u2019s attention away from the spectacle of death and toward the social conditions that made such actions possible in the first place. I wanted the viewer to see whiteness in a new way and to point to those affective attachments that made such collective acts of violence acceptable to these individuals in the first place. Which is to say that this double lynching was not the spontaneous act of a mob, but was planned, and included elements of previous lynchings. This double lynching had been planned and announced in advance, which helps explain how and why the crowd numbered in the thousands. The two men were accused of kidnapping Brooke Hart, the twenty-two-year-old son of a prominent businessman, and were being held in the jail across from the park when his body was discovered.6<\/a><\/sup> Some readers might recall that the search for the kidnappers\/killers of the Lindbergh baby was still ongoing in 1933, which only added to the explosiveness of the Hart case. Even California\u2019s Governor \u201cSunny Jim\u201d Rolph embraced the lynching as a \u201cfine lesson to the whole nation,\u201d reflecting popular sentiments on kidnapping at that time.7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ken Gonzales-Day, The Wonder Gaze,<\/em> 2006\/2018, vinyl billboard (artwork \u00a9 Ken Gonzales-Day; photograph by Clifford Pickett and Alyssa Meadows, provided by the artist)\n\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Ken Gonzales-Day, The Wonder Gaze<\/em>, from the series Erased Lynching<\/em>, 2006, 40 x 85 in. (101.6 x 216.6\u2009cm), manipulated photograph, ink on rag paper (artwork \u00a9 Ken Gonzales-Day\/Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to draw a connection between lynching and the events of January 6, 2021 and to suggest that collective acts of (mob) violence must be linked to the corrosive effects of vigilantism, white nationalism, and fascism in this country. The case is also a useful reminder that images of lynching were produced and mailed as postcards across the United States and extended the terror represented in the lynching of over 4,400 African Americans, not to mention the victims who were Latinx, BIPOC, white, or immigrants lynched across the United States since its founding.8<\/a><\/sup> The fact that these two men were white only heightens our ability to see connections between lynching and whiteness. Having examined and studied photographic images of racial and ethnic terror, from lynching to the Holocaust, I could not help but be horrified by the frenzied excitement of those who would have ended US democracy on that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us consider another image. In Sunday Early<\/em>, 1933, we see a group of adults from the same lynching as the one depicted on the billboard. Chillingly, Thurmond and Holmes may have still been hanging from the trees when the photograph was taken. The man and woman appear to be filled with a kind of joy as they posed by the tree. Other figures are touching the places where the bark had been removed. As with many lynching cases, the trees had to be cut down to keep souvenir hunters from taking every inch. The 2021 Capitol attack protesters, rioters, and insurgents looked no less exuberant as I watched them on the news, and it was clear to me that whiteness is not about race as much as it is about the imaginary of race. The people in the crowd in the lynching image smile, laugh, and stare blankly, their behaviors reminiscent of those of the rioters at the Capitol building, who committed various violent acts and took selfies. As the American novelist Toni Morrison wrote, seeming to speak to our own historical moment, \u201cI know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge\u2014even wisdom. Like art.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup> Morrison hints at a very different kind of joy, the kind that art can bring, even in the face of affects like anguish, anger, fear, and of course, terror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is important to note that my own work on lynching began as a response to real world vigilantes who emerged along the US-Mexico border back in the early 2000s, when groups like the Minuteman Project were symbolic of a wave of anti-Mexican, anti-Latinx, anti-immigration rhetoric that was being propagated by then-president George W. Bush. By the time I began working on my book Lynching in the West: 1850\u20131935<\/em>, new Minutemen branches were popping up by the dozen. I wrote on California\u2019s history of lynching at a time when few were willing to acknowledge the brutal killing and racial terror faced by many Latinx communities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I documented over 354 cases of lynching in the state of California and changed, or at least tried to change, the narrative. In California, the majority of lynching victims were BIPOC (Asian, Black, Latinx, and Native American) with Latinx victims making up the largest single group, at over 38 percent of the total case list.10<\/a><\/sup> This research was integral to three of my photographic projects: Erased Lynchings<\/em>, already discussed; Searching for California Hang Trees<\/em>, where I went out looking for possible sites; and Memento Mori<\/em>, a series of portraits in which contemporary individuals stand in for those killed by lynch mobs and vigilantes (in California). While no artwork can address the ongoing pain and trauma of lynching to African Americans and their families, my project was produced in solidarity with a wave of new scholarship that emerged on lynching in the early 2000s and that helped to raise awareness of the history of lynching in California and nationwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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