Okwui Enwezor imagined the exhibition
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America as a direct and necessary intervention into the 2020 presidential election campaign in the United States. If the show had opened as planned, at the New Museum in New York last October, it would have been poised to interrupt—albeit from the margins of high culture—the chaotic, overheated, and largely empty rhetoric of the political campaign with an elegant articulation of substantive artistic responses to the harrowing and unrelenting experience of extreme anti-Black violence in this country, coalescing rather beautifully with months and years of critical thinking and crucial protest from the Black Lives Matter movement. But Enwezor died in 2019 at the age of just fifty-five, following a long fight with cancer. Nothing went as planned last year, and so the show was postponed.