A stone’s throw from the kitsch and luxe of the Magnificent Mile, in a north-facing window on Ontario, the Indian god Ganesh merges with the figure of a child impaled through the frontal lobe with a martial pole. Beyond them, a tapestry hangs, where the silhouette of a lynched woman forms a dark blot against a wall of flames, rioters running beneath her feet. To the right, a shirtless boy with tattoos and scraped knees sits astride a bison with a child in his arms and a dusty American flag slung over one shoulder, while a few yards away fringed Vodou flags beaded by Haitian weavers glitter boldly on the wall. As you enter, you hear the faint strains of the national anthem and slip into a darkened chamber where a watercolor image of Colin Kaepernick takes a knee every two minutes. Upstairs, a mosque is intricately rendered in bullets, gun parts, and a repurposed cluster bomb, placed across from a menorah made of much the same. Flags, maps, guns, and currency are everywhere—upside down, right side up, dismantled, defaced, torn apart, woven together, and assembled, erupting in a fountain from the frame of a bicycle. You might almost forget that you’re standing in an architectural marvel: a city of roadblocks, choked off from its parks and waters, where just weeks ago bridges were raised to hem protesters into the tight island of its financial district. Or not.
“Contemporary artists are visionary witnesses,” says Stites. “Their work reflects not only what is going on in the immediate present but often anticipates what is coming. That’s why at 21c we believe art can shape the future. At this moment of public health and crisis of justice, we should be looking to artists to provide the road map.” As one striking example, Stites cites American artist Kara Walker’s 2008 A Warm Summer Evening in 1863. “It’s a textile of a girl looking like she’s been lynched, over an image from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War that shows a draft riot in New York City. The draft riot was not simply because white men in New York didn’t want to fight for emancipation, but also because they feared emancipation would drive them out of their jobs. We’re still dealing with what wasn’t dealt with historically.”
“If we are going to start healing, it’s our duty to get more comfortable with being more uncomfortable,” says Stites. “Police brutality and the legacy of racism that is so corrosive and painful have been difficult, challenging, uncomfortable topics for people to engage around. James Baldwin has said, ‘Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ Until we look honestly at these issues and their ramifications—legally, socially, and culturally—until we look directly and squarely at ourselves in this moment, we can’t look forward to a better day. Art can allow us to do that.”
7/15-12/2020, 21c Museum Hotel Chicago, 55 E. Ontario, 21cmuseumhotels.com, free.
