New Museum –
„Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America“

The New Museum will begin the new year with a long-planned and still ongoing project: In 2018, the museum invited curator Okwui Enwezor to organize the exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America. At the time, Enwezor, a longtime member of the Deutsche Bank Global Art Advisory Council, was working on a lecture series for Harvard University that was to deal with the intersections between black mourning and white nationalism in the U.S.A. and how contemporary African American artists view this theme. A few months before his death in 2019, Enwezor asked the African American artist Glenn Ligon to help oversee the project. Now Ligon has realized the exhibition together with the curators Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, and Mark Nash. The show features 37 artists from different generations who use various artistic media to address racist violence in the USA. The works show how unequally black mourning and the complaints and lamentations of whites are dealt with and how this disparity shapes social life in the USA. Certainly one of the most important New York art events of 2021.

Until the opening, the New Museum Now digital program, which has set new standards, is highly recommended. In the series Bedtime Stories, celebrities such as Tacita Dean and Iggy Pop tell stories to make isolation more pleasant, and there are discussions with Judith Butler, artist’s films (by Hiwa K, among others), and of course virtual tours. This innovative, superlative program can easily compete with Netflix in terms of entertainment value.

Grief and Grievance:
Art and Mourning in America
January 27 – June 6, 2021
New Museum, New York
www.newmuseum.tv