These Ten Artworks from the High’s Collection Poignantly and Passionately Acknowledge the Black Experience in the United States
Sit with these works, learn from them, and let them spark conversations about histories of oppression, the power of protest, and the pursuit of progress.
For our city and the nation, this moment is distinctly about the fact that Black lives matter. Because Atlanta is our city; because it is the birthplace of the civil rights movement; and because as your art museum we draw inspiration from the bravery, candor, and commitment of those who have built this community of progress with their actions, we despair at the senseless violence and loss of life that continue to threaten members of the African American community — indeed, our community.
As an organization, we cannot address or fathom the complexity and challenge of this current moment on our own. We can, however, gain perspective, some measure of understanding, and a sense of purpose by listening to the voices and vision of artists whose work we are proud to have within our collection.
Below is a roundup of all the artwork we presented from June 1 to June 10 on the High Museum’s Instagram and Facebook. Read on to explore these artists and the powerful themes that define the experience of being Black in the United States of America.
1. Arthur Jafa
In Arthur Jafa’s powerful work of art created in 2016, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, the artist combines original footage with clips from documentary film, news media, social media, and Hollywood to illustrate a century of tumultuous Black experience in the United States, from Jim Crow to Ferguson.
This montage alternates between scenes of triumph and jubilation and those of conflict, violence, and upheaval. The music is Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” sung by Chicago-born artist Chance the Rapper and serves as both a lament and a meditation on spiritual and social awakening. Jafa immerses the audience in the sorrows, joys, injustices, and triumphs of Black America.
2. Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett made this terra-cotta of a young Black man in 1955 and called it Target. A graduate of Howard University and among the first Black women artists to gain national prominence, Catlett fought for human and civil rights throughout her career. In this work, with just a single word, Catlett reminds us of the unrelenting threat that to this day burdens every Black man in America.
3. Sheila Pree Bright
In March 2015, Sheila Pree Bright documented the fiftieth anniversary of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday,” a brutal police assault on civil rights demonstrators marching toward Montgomery, the state’s capital. The broad dissemination of the shocking photographs and footage of police violence from that day galvanized the nation and spurred the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But as the fiercely determined gaze of the young woman at the center of this photograph suggests, the struggle for justice and the end to white supremacy remains ongoing.
Pree Bright was sparked by her attendance at the 2014 protests following the shooting death by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Her #1960Now series joins portraits of civil rights activists from both the 1960s and the contemporary moment with documentary photographs of recent demonstrations. Even as this photograph connects today’s Black Lives Matter protests to the extraordinary civil rights movement of the 1960s, it also serves as an anguishing reminder of the continued racism and injustice that define this country.
4. Nellie Mae Rowe
Nellie Mae Rowe was born on the Fourth of July 1900 in Fayetteville, Georgia. She moved to Vinings — a suburb of Atlanta — in 1939 at a time when the influx of African American people moving closer to the city contributed to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Despite the specter of racial violence that loomed over her life, when she was in her late sixties, she boldly transformed her house and yard into what she called her “Playhouse,” returning to her childhood passion for drawing and making dolls.
This early work shows her hand outstretched as if in benediction of her proclamation, God is Not Dead. Not long before her death in 1982, she said, “The pictures I am proud of that I have made are of my hand. [. . .] I’ll be gone to rest but they can look back and say ‘that is Nellie Mae’s hand.’” Today her drawing stands not only as a reminder of the mark she made on the world through her art but also as a symbol of the bodily and spiritual resiliency of African American people in spite of the threats they continue to face in this country.
5. Justin Rothshank
Made by the ceramic artist Justin Rothshank, who believes that art can catalyze social change, this communion set celebrates Atlanta’s critical role in the civil rights movement by representing photographs of civil and religious leaders drawn from the High’s collection. The cups suggest the individual and the need for active participation in community activism. When lined up, the cups form a wall, referencing the way civil rights activists formed a wall when marching in the 1960s. Alternatively, the platter collects the cups into an implied prayer circle. While this set records and honors the foundational figures of the 1960s civil rights movement, it is also a call to action for all of us living in the United States today — we must enact change and hold society accountable, affirming that Black lives matter.
6. Fante Artist, Ghana
This Asafo flag depicts Elmina, which was the first of more than eighty fortresses built by European powers on the coastline of modern-day Ghana between the 1400s and 1700s. Built by the Portuguese not long after they discovered gold there and used for centuries to traffic hundreds of thousands of Africans to the Americas and Caribbean, the fortress came under British control in 1872, hence the Union Jack flag in the upper left corner of this flag above the towers. The wire that stretches between the depicted fortifications represents the telegraph station built by the British about a decade before this flag was made by an unidentified Fante artist. Flags such as this once served as transmitters of social and political messages used by Fante people to adorn sacred spaces and in ceremonial and wartime processions. The prominence of the telegraph wire in this flag, for instance, may have been the artist’s way of communicating the advanced technology that Great Britain was using to maintain its colonial rule.
Today Elmina Castle is preserved as a Ghanaian national museum and was designated as a World Heritage Monument under UNESCO in 1979. It is a place of pilgrimage for many African Americans seeking to connect with their lost heritage.
The responses of another Ghanaian artist, Paa Joe, to the legacy of Gold Coast fortresses like Elmina will be on view at the High Museum again starting July 7 for members and July 18 for the general public. In the meantime, you can view the Paa Joe virtual tour to learn more.
7. Kara Walker
Working across media, Kara Walker explores themes of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. In her artworks, she constructs elaborate, often violent, tableaux evoking the world of the pre-Civil War South, distorting and exaggerating the shapes of bodies while concealing pictorial detail and establishing a sameness among the protagonists. Through the use of silhouettes, Walker leads the audience to discern enslaved people from slaveholders through their own recognition of racial stereotypes, thus forcing her audience to confront uncomfortable realities and their own complicity in them.
Born in Stockton, California, Walker moved with her family to Georgia at the age of thirteen and lived most of her teen years in Stone Mountain. In the shadow of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Carving — a Civil War monument and the site of the 1915 Ku Klux Klan revival — Walker experienced the South’s blunt resistance to integration and the racist legacy of Jim Crow segregation laws. With her biting satire, The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin combines racial stereotypes with imagery of the antebellum South into a room-sized narrative frieze depicting contributions of the domestic slave trade to the Civil War and the ensuing racial terrorism of Jim Crow. By reframing the tableau at Stone Mountain (the three figures on horseback in the center of her composition), Walker constructed a contemporary parable of the intrinsic bigotry and racialized hatred that still exists across the United States.
To learn more about this complicated work of art, check out the interactive feature on the High’s website.
8. Dawoud Bey
Few images of love have such resounding power as this lush portrait of a young, stylish couple embracing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Note how their bodies fit together perfectly, how he relaxes his shoulders just so, allowing her to easily wrap her arms around him tightly, protectively, declaring with the upward tilt of her chin and her direct gaze at us that she is his and he is hers. We can’t help but feel a tinge of envy for their youthful ardor, which exudes hope and desire and something else, too — a sense of a secret shared only between them. A portrait this openly intimate isn’t taken; it’s earned.
Dawoud Bey made this work in 1990 as part of a series rethinking the often predatory traditions of street photography. Seeking an equitable, reciprocal relationship with his subjects, Bey approached strangers directly and asked them to pose for his camera. He also chose to use Polaroid Type 55 film, which produced both instant pictures that he immediately gave to the sitters and negatives that he used to make large-scale, highly detailed prints such as this one, where his subjects affirm their place in the world and assert their right to be tender and intimate. This picture emerged from Bey’s deep and abiding, in his words, “interest in wanting to describe the Black subject in a way that’s as complex as the experiences of anyone else. It’s meant to kind of reshape the world one person at a time.”
The High Museum is honored to show this and other works by Bey this fall in the exhibition Dawoud Bey: An American Project, organized by SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art.
9. Benny Andrews
Benny Andrews was the cofounder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. He organized protests against museums for their systematic exclusion of Black artists and, in 1971, launched a major prison art program.
That year, the Attica prison riot and deadly siege brought awareness across the country to the squalid living conditions of the disproportionately Black prison population. Andrews made a number of paintings based on reports of the abuse of prisoners and the emotional devastation, alienation, and cruelty in Attica, inspired by their four-day standoff.
Andrew’s image of an inmate with his hands bound in front of him evokes the art historical subject Ecce Homo (Latin for “Behold the Man”) from the Passion of Christ in which a half-naked, shackled Christ is presented by Pontius Pilate to a hostile crowd before his crucifixion. Its composition bears similarity to numerous representations of this scene from the Passion, including Rembrandt’s Ecce Homo in London’s National Gallery. Strung Out offers a powerful critique of institutionalized racial prejudice in the US criminal justice system.
10. Glenn Kaino
Invisible Man (Salute) is part of a multiyear collaboration between Los Angeles–based artist Glenn Kaino and gold-medal sprinter Tommie Smith, known around the world for his gesture of protest at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City. This life-size likeness of Smith is made of blackened aluminum and mirrored stainless steel. From the back, the sculpture shows Smith in his tracksuit. From the front, Smith’s figure becomes a mirror in which visitors see themselves reflected, thus collapsing each individual’s experience within a continuum of history since 1968.
The sculpture’s title, Invisible Man, alludes both to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel of the social invisibility of Black people in white society and to Smith’s own feeling of invisibility/invincibility wearing sunglasses during competitions. Interpreted by white media in the 1960s as nonconformist and provocative, Smith’s sunglasses recall the protagonist of Ellison’s novel, who wears sunglasses as a way of adapting to white society at the cost of his own identity.
Tommie Smith’s historic gesture of defiance and unity at the 1968 Olympics, raising a gloved fist atop the gold medal podium, took place against a backdrop of global turmoil. That year saw international upheaval in the wake of the bloody Tet Offensive and ongoing Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, civil unrest in Chicago, violent police response to demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, and deadly confrontations between the police and members of the Black Panther Party in Oakland and Los Angeles.
Today, Smith’s gesture continues to resonate and inspire the actions and gestures of people for whom his iconic image is a symbol of courage and unity in the face of bigotry and racial injustice.
