MELVIN A. MARSHALL

Senior Curator and writer Melvin A. Marshall's follow-up to last year’s MASTERPIECE - The Inaugural Show brings together 20 artists answering this year's central themes: Globalization, Pandemics, Racial Reckoning & Giorgio Agamben's 'Bare Life': Where Do We Go From Here? 

MASTERPIECE II: Globalization, Pandemics, Racial Reckoning & Giorgio Agamben's 'Bare Life': Where Do We Go From Here? is an exhibition that is predicated on the idea that lives lived on the margins of society are lives that are half lived. Whether seen through a social, political, historical, racial, economic, cultural or geographical prism, these lives are preoccupied with achieving and sustaining only the bare necessities that life has to offer. The migrant worker, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the dispossessed, the disappeared, the displaced, the separated families at the border, and the homeless, all have been shunned, blackballed and prohibited from the legal, political and economic opportunities that are granted to most in the fraternity of the social sphere. The exhibition will engage with such pressing tropes as visibility and invisibility, racial justice, history, memory, equality, sexuality, femininity, masculinity & trans aesthetics, among other topics in the American imaginary. What if the migrant worker, the refugee, the political prisoner, the dispossessed, the disappeared, the victim of torture are not only constitutive of modernity but its emblematic subjects? It is with such details in mind that I bring in the scholarly writings and thoughts of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben has developed a theory of marginalization that advances beyond the binary distinctions associated with inclusion/exclusion, center/margins, inside/outside and other such binary dichotomies. 

History tells us that this era is difficult but not unique. The forces that are shaping the worst parts of us right now are forces that are part of the American character and fabric such as nativism, xenophobia, racism, sexism and isolationism. Our polarization as a society seems greater than ever on the bases regarding race, class, economics, basic fairness and decency are all at generational inflection points. History gives us the ability to see what the nature & scope of our crisis and how previous generations addressed those crises and how those lessons apply. We must arm ourselves with a historical understanding of how complex our history was, we are not going to be able to react in real time to save America. It is not unexpected in these tumultuous times that we scrutinize our past in order to understand the present. This exhibition will present some of the most reasoned & enlightened artists wielding their visual scalpels in order to examine and elucidate the challenges troubling our society. 

The story of race, fear, anxiety and violence is inextricably intertwined with the story of America. America is in a constant struggle of its better angels fighting against its worst impulses. What happens when you add economic anxiety and a pandemic to an already incendiary cocktail of stress and unease? How have we evolved as a society from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s seminal 1967 text "Where Do We Go From Here?" to our current Black Lives Matter Movement of today? These are some of the questions and issues that these contemporary artists have been asked to engage, grapple with and embrace in this exhibition 

The world finds itself at another incredible inflection point currently as well. Grappling with multiple dire crises simultaneously, including struggling to overcome social & racial unrest, embroiled in a political & economic distress for the millennia, all while having to fight with an out-of-control global pandemic. It is during these uncertain times, that we have historically looked to our contemporary artists for guidance and reassurance that we will find a way through these uncertain times as well. The summer of 2020 represented a period that gripped the American consciousness, which included the senseless police killing of George Floyd. This event brought an international spotlight to the social and racial unrest that plagues America. The murder of George Floyd led to international Black Lives Matter Movement protests for equal opportunities & justice. The Covid-19 pandemic mandated that governments globally put into place devastating stay-at-home orders that required an unprecedented halt to normal economic activity, which caused an unparalleled number of international travel restrictions, many of which are only now beginning to ease.  

These artists would make civil rights leaders and political activists of the past proud of the way that they have tackled the challenging issues of our day. Sculptor Alicia Piller interrogates societies decaying infrastructures including those formidable and seemingly immovable stalwarts such as capitalism, colonialism and manifest destiny in her sculpture VINES CRAWL OVER CRACKS, RECONSTRUCTING RUINS (2021).

Painter B. Robert Moore has engaged with the curatorial statement directly in seeking answers to questions such as "where do we go from here?" by employing the prose of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the poetry of Tupac Shakur in his painting WE ROSE (2021). 

In 2020, photographer Maya Iman chose to use her specialized photographic skills to capture the Los Angeles Black Lives Matter Movement marches and protests and the trauma surrounding the killing of George Floyd at the hands of the convicted Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd pleaded for his life to Chauvin and explained that he "can't breathe" nearly 30 times but to no avail as he refused to remove his knee from his neck and Floyd succumbed to asphyxiation and died after 9 minutes and 29 seconds of unrelenting pressure. Chauvin was found guilty of Floyd’s murder in 2021. In #AM I NEXT? (2020), the photograph shows a young African American male child holding a sign sitting on the shoulders of a Black woman asking the hashtag question "#Am I Next?' 

This provocative prompt is intended to highlight the fact that these societal derangements and ills of killing Black people are infecting and corrupting our Black youth as well. While our Black youth should only be concerned with growing up to be contributing members of a healthy society, they have not been afforded such luxuries as they must grow up sooner than their white youth counterparts do by not being protected and shielded from some of the harsher realities of the real world.