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Through the Eyes of Others group show at the ARC.  Photo by @venusinorbit. 

Foreground: Standing Chart #1, 2005-15. Painted wood. The letters and words on different axes provide a pretext for describing a disjointed and fragmentary history of the black experience that is both contentious and yet becoming. Background: Buffalo Chart, 2005-15. Painted wood and found objects. This piece symbolically depicts a chronicle of American history pointing both to the trauma and survival of people of color in America. Artist: Bernard Williams. 

Through the Eyes of Others explores the hard truths about racial disparity and economic inequality in the United States. Curated by Tumelo Mosaka, the show runs at Arts and Recreation Center (The ARC) of the Opa-Locka Community Development Center, 675 Ali Baba Avenue, Opa-Locka, FL 33054, until Friday, December 11th 2015.

Text by curator, Tumelo Mosaka. Photos by @venusinorbit. 2015.

Barcode, 2014. Quilt made out of decommissioned prison uniforms. Artist: Hank Willis Thomas. This piece underscores the depersonalization of identity within the prison industrial complex. The uniform is often perceived as stigmatizing and is a symbol of loss of individuality. Inmates are tracked and controlled - representing the modern justification for the massive prison bureaucracy.

Racial disparity and economic inequality have persisted because efforts to remedy the impact of past discriminatory laws and practices have not yet been adequately addressed. We have come a long way since slavery and the fight for Civil Rights. However, racism and its social ramifications remain pressing issues today.

Lockdown, 2001. C-Prints and audio. Artist: Dread Scott. Using portraits and interviews of inmates, the piece contemplates the impact of mass incarceration and how the criminal justice system strips away the humanity of those imprisoned. It seeks to dispel the negative stigma associated with being a felon and captures moments of personal reflection and desire transcending the condition of incarceration.

Recent attention to fatal shootings and the use of excessive force by police has raised public concern about bias in policing methods and the blatant disregard of black lives. The tragic deaths of innocent victims by police in Baltimore, Ferguson, Staten Island, and New York, among other cities, has exposed racist attitudes by law enforcement agents. 

I am not a Man, 2009. Performance stills. Artist: Dread Scott. Staged on the streets of Harlem, these photos recall the iconic photo documenting the 1968 Memphis Sanitation workers strike. This piece is aimed at addressing the continued racism that is foundational to America’s history.

But at a broader level, these deaths point to larger structural problems regarding the failure of public policies to protect and provide equal access to employment, housing, and education to black people, particularly black men. Instead, millions remain incarcerated or die because of inequalities created by previous laws and discriminatory practices.

Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, 2014. Wood, fabric and embellishments. Artist: Ebony G. Patterson. This piece explores cultural rituals, particularly dancehall, in Jamaica. The artist adopts a funerary practice used by working class communities to address the social taboos and violence towards black masculine identity. Within the dancehall context, the poor are glorified and celebrated only at their funeral.

In contemporary America, the black subject is paradoxically invisible and hypervisible. Likewise, while the video documentation of these acts of police violence has brought injustice to light, these images, and those who record them, are also witnesses to what it means to be seen “as black.”

Zero Hour, 2012. Digital c-print and plexi with Lumisty film. Artists: Hank Willis Thomas. The piece addresses how racial identity is informed by attitudes and assumptions from popular culture. These images are coated with film to create a hologram effect, and captures a white-painted man in profile turning black over the course of six images to suggest a spectrum of positions associated with racial identification. The optical effect serves as a metaphor for the increasing blurry lines of racial categorization.

Through the Eyes of Others provides a critical platform for re-imagining black identity beyond racial difference. It approaches race and cultural memory as complex fields of knowledge that influence how people think, behave, identify and perceive. Seeing through the eyes of others defamiliarizes the fictions and realities of black America by binding them close and setting them at a distance. On view until Friday, December 11, 2015.

Detail of Buffalo Chart, by Bernard Wiliiams. 

Everton Wright’s The Walking Drawings Premiere in Opa Locka

Celebrated Black British Artist, Everton Wright will launch the META series for the 2015 Art of Transformation season with the Opa-Locka Community Development Corporation on Sunday, February 22,2015 at the Art and Recreation Center (ARC) from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm at  651 Ali Baba Ave.  The  series includes several cultural arts events beginning in Spring, 2015 and culminating at Opa-Locka’s eagerly…