A life-sized simulation of Michael Brown’s body lies face-down on the floor, surrounded by police tape and traffic cones while above him, a video image of Eartha Kitt sings about black angels.
A small model of the Statue of Liberty stands on a pedestal, its visage done up in blackface.
A canvas of cracker boxes forms the backdrop for the words, “WHITE PRIVILEGE, THE LAST OUTPOST OF PSYCHOLOGICAL OBLIVION.”
There is not much subtext in the work of Ti-Rock Moore, a New Orleans artist whose 50, mostly frank, angry pieces about racial injustice comprise the show, “Confronting Truths: Wake Up!”, on view at the Gallery Guichard, 436 E. 47th St., in the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
But the controversy has come because of the directness of the piece incorporating the prostrate silicone likeness of Brown, the 18-year-old African-American man fatally shot by a white, Ferguson, Mo., cop in August 2014.
Part of the reason is that Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., criticized the work in a television news interview after the show went up early this month — although his mother, Lesley McSpadden, attended the show’s opening in Chicago and, according to the gallery’s Instagram account, thanked Moore, who was also on hand.
Part of the reason is that some black commentators have argued that the piece makes Brown Jr. a victim all over again. But probably the biggest part of it is that the artist who chose this method to make her statement about black lives is white.
“My reaction is to her having her white hands on Michael Brown’s black body when he’s not here to protect himself,” cultural critic Kirsten West Savali wrote in a piece at TheRoot.com that calls the work “a crude plagiarism of (ex-Ferguson police officer) Darren Wilson’s brutality.”
“A working definition of white privilege is white artists’ belief that they can claim artistic ownership of black death,” said Savali.
The irony is that Moore is acutely aware of what she calls the “unearned advantages” her race gives her. One of her works in the show is a stop sign with “White Privilege” painted beneath the command word. Another is a glass-fronted box with a hammer attached. Inside are the words “White Privilege.” Outside, the letters read, “In case of emergency, break glass.”
Gallery owners Andre and Frances Guichard are aware of it, too, and see Moore, whom they got to know through visits to her studio over the past year, as someone fighting the good fight.
“She sees herself as an activist and instead of standing on the picket line, she’s creating beautiful, conceptual pieces that get her message across,” Andre Guichard said. “If you don’t think, in 2015, that people of other skin colors can have an opinion, that’s a sign we need to have further conversation about it.”
Frances Guichard drew a comparison to the issue of sex trafficking. “You don’t have to be exploited to be able to champion the cause,” she said. “It’s about inhumanity. You can be on the outside looking in to make positive change.”
The Guichards have had their gallery for ten years and as they try to extend the legacy of art in Bronzeville, they also seek out work with a point of view. Nothing has resonated quite like this show.
“It’s been surprisingly able to do what it’s intended to do,” Andre said.
Frances pointed to words on the wall above the show’s title and read aloud: “‘Provocative, illuminating, courageous,'” she said. “It’s ‘confronting truths,’ and people are waking up to the conversation.”
As for Moore, the 56-year-old lifelong New Orleanian came across as achingly sincere about her intentions in an interview this week. “I’m resolved to speak the truth of what many white Americans continue to ignore,” she said. “I hope to address how American society is run under the guise of opportunity, but in reality for people of color, it’s racism and systemic oppression that run the country.”
She said she sees the Michael Brown piece, entitled “Angelitos Negros” after the title of the Eartha Kitt song, as a memorial to the death of Michael Brown and a commemoration of the event as “the beginning of the modern-day Civil Rights movement.” The exhibition’s other Ferguson-related piece, “Black Angels,” puts an upside-down American flag in a winged box, decorated with bullets and small images of Brown in his death position and a large one of him smiling.
Moore’s political and artistic awakening came a decade ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she said.
“Me watching my fellow New Orleanians stranded and abandoned and dying and desperate here in the days after Katrina ignited this in me,” she said by telephone.
Indeed, when you visit “Confronting Truths,” the two things you hear are Kitt’s singing and the audio from another piece, President George W. Bush congratulating another Michael Brown, his FEMA director at the time of the hurricane, with, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” followed by applause.
The piece, “Heck of a Job,” consists of an iPad showing that Bush moment atop a wooden cross otherwise emblazoned with the stars and stripes and 452 racial epithets. It is Moore’s reaction to the hurricane relief effort as, she said, “a giant racist event.”
Other works in “Confronting Truths” incorporate Klan robes, nooses and lots of words in neon. Among the most effective pieces is, “Protect and Serve,” a protest against the lack of punishment in the case of Eric Garner, who died in the custody of New York City police. It’s a neon sign reading “Choke Hold,” with the words on top of one another but with the two Os replaced by a rope noose.
A daughter of two visual artists who won’t disclose what she did for a living previously, or what her real name is, Moore (whose pen name is an homage to the New Orleans artist Noel Rockmore) began showing her art in 2014, she said.
Knowing that the Michael Brown Jr. piece could be controversial, she did not put it up for sale, she said, and she and the Guichards did reach out to Michael Brown’s family ahead of time. “I wanted their blessing,” Moore said.
All three say they regret their mistake in addressing the letter jointly to Brown’s mother and father. It apparently never got to Michael Brown Sr., who told a St. Louis TV reporter after the show had opened, “I really, really, really would like for them to take that (artwork) away.. I think it’s really disturbring, disgusting.”
But by then, said Moore, the work was out. “I assumed everyone (in the family) was on board, and that was my mistake,” she said. “But it had been released. It was out in the public. … There is no taking that back.
“I want it to be very clear that the farthest thing from my mind is appropriating black bodies. That is what my work is about, the control and the abuse of black bodies that’s foundational to American democracy … But the piece is a powerful piece of art, and I think that part of the response is a reflection of how powerful it is.”
The Guichards, too, are standing by the art and the artist and are considering extending the show beyond its planned Aug. 10 conclusion.
While some of the criticism from within the black community has been tough, Andre Guichard said, “I really feel like we’re on the right side of things from a historical standpoint. You look at this piece, she’s just saying he’s a black angel.”
Twitter: @StevenKJohnson
