Complex Partners With New Museum on “Grief & Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”

The New Museum presents “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America”—an extensive art exhibition that explores the racist violence toward the Black community and the emotional pain it has afflicted on many generations.

The concept was conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, with the intention of highlighting the long-standing national emergency through themes of mourning, commemoration, and loss. The exhibit showcases a wide range of work from 37 artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford, Kevin Beasley, Arthur Jafa, Hank Willis Thomas, Simone Leigh, and Kerry James Marshall.

“With the media’s normalization of white nationalism, the last two years have made clear that there is a new urgency to assess the role that artists, through works of art, have played to illuminate the searing contours of the American body politic,” Enwezor wrote in his initial narrative for the exhibition.

Today, Complex and the New Museum have launched a media partnership with a 360-degree video of “Grief and Grievance.” Readers can explore the exhibition with Complex’s Managing Director of Climate, Stanley Lumax, who toured the gallery during Black History Month.

“I’m feeling highs and lows,” Lumax said about his experience, “A quote that stuck in my head, ‘I wish America loved Black people the way it loves Black culture.’”