Art and Mourning
The latest exhibition at New Yorkâs New Museum presents a searing cross-section of work by Black American artists. Titled
Grief and Grievance, it was the vision of Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), a pioneering advocate of modern African art since the early 1990s, known for selecting and arranging works to elicit dialogues with wider themes such as colonialism, apartheid and black liberation. In 2018, under the overtly white-nationalist presidency of Donald Trump, Enwezor was invited to organise a major exhibition at the museum in Manhattan.
Already suffering from cancer, Enwezor was simultaneously preparing a series of talks for Harvardâs Alain LeRoy Locke Lecture Series on the relationship between black mourning and white nationalism, as expressed through contemporary black art. In his lecture drafts â which he was unable to present due to his declining health â Enwezor developed the spine of what would become