Heartbreak and Resurrection

A brutal, essential show that pulls from the canon of Black contemporary art.

THE NEW MUSEUM’S show “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” finds terrible beauty in the pain, rage, mania, and sorrow that form the continuing psychosis of this country’s obsession with race. Featuring 37 Black artists working in the United States from 1964 to today, it plumbs the long American night of racism with an eye on the poetics of abstraction, the possibilities of monochrome, and the documentation of bare facts. Together, these 97 pieces suggest Black artists have made the most important art of our time.

It’s notable that this exhibition, with its themes of mourning and loss, was the last organized by the great Nigerian-born, Germany-based curator Okwui Enwezor, a visionary pioneer of international multiculturalism, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 55. Part of the big global art world that self-started in the early ’90s, Enwezor’s animating purpose as a curator seemed to be to declare a war on the apartheid within the institutional art world, which simply left artists from Africa out of exhibitions. Above all other curators of his generation, Enwezor brought contemporary African art and history to bear on the whole world, and he was unabashed about wanting power so that he could effect change. The show was incomplete at his death and has ably been brought to fruition using notes from and conversations with Enwezor by curators Naomi Beckwith and Massimiliano Gioni, artist Glenn Ligon, and independent curator-writer Mark Nash.