The need for care has never been so vital—and so exhausting. While a long summer of protest pushed the boundaries of what must happen to make Black Lives Matter, often resulting in violent reprisal, the impending presidential election continues to narrow this open terrain of communal support and anger into the compromised binary of America’s two-party system. Hovering over everything, of course, are the hundreds of thousands of global COVID deaths that cannot be mourned in any traditional way, the very impulse to grieve together a major contributor to the virus’s continuation.
Throughout their planning, the curators drew from a recent article by Tamara Kneese and Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart called “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” As Knesse and Hobart argue in the piece: “Because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect, and even to position some groups against others, determining who is worthy of care and who is not.”
10/1-3/21: Thu-Sun 11 AM-4 PM, Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, 5550 S. Greenwood, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu, reservations required.
