Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce 202020…, a special project of murals and works on paper by Kay Rosen—the artist’s third presentation at the gallery.
Each of Kay Rosen’s paintings begins when she finds a striking coincidence in the structure of a word or phrase. Depending on how she presents these discoveries, her works can encourage wrestling with our most complex social and political dilemmas—spare, razor-sharp compositions that pack an intellectual and emotional punch. They epitomize the concept of concision: few words, working in overdrive, summoning stories others have parsed over volumes, decades, bales of newsprint. In this show, in 2020, Rosen uses a handful of basic visual devices (scale, stacking, omission, color, misalignment) to reflect a country mired in multiple ongoing crises, prompt a reckoning with the past, and remind us—even (and especially) those of us who are complicit in the ills we face—we are all charged with creating a better world for future generations.
202020… includes only four works (all of which were made by hand, with a brush or a pencil): a large mural, Black and Blue, faces the drawing SOB; in another space, the wall painting Brown v. is installed across from Spring, an acrylic gouache on paper.
The title of Black and Blue, of course, is a euphemism for being bruised, perhaps beaten. For some, the phrase might describe the emotional effects of reading the daily news since 2016—learning about each new assault the current administration has levied against truth, science, the environment, democratic norms, and people of color. For others, the piece is less idiomatic than literal—a representation of the mortal peril lurking within even the most mundane interactions with the police: a portrait of a Black body surrounded (outnumbered, overwhelmed) by officers in blue uniforms. It reads BLUE & / BLACK / & BLUE, three lines of text taking up nearly the entire primary wall of the gallery, floor to ceiling, edge to edge. George Floyd was widely loved, a father and grandfather, the first of his siblings to go to college, and is remembered saying “I want to touch the world,” as a teenager. Breonna Taylor was an EMT and aspiring nurse; she loved cooking and playing cards with her aunts. Elijah McClain was a massage therapist who loved animals and played the violin to soothe stray cats; a friend described him as “the sweetest, purest person I have ever met.” Mike Ramos was an Austin resident, a Cowboys and Longhorns fan; he was an only son with a big heart, and he checked in often on his mom. George, Breonna, Elijah, Mike—they should all still be alive.
SOB, then, functions as both a verb and an acronym, a eulogy and an expletive. Its diminutive size, especially when installed directly across from the colossal wall painting Black and Blue, echoes the pain of powerlessness that comes from facing the structural inequalities that plague this nation. For Rosen, SOB embodies the frustration, outrage, and heartbreak from injustices of all kinds: the many plights of Black Americans, the politicization of face masks despite a loss of more than 145,000 lives from COVID-19 (and counting) in the US alone, small children separated from their parents at the border, the fight for reproductive rights, the attempt to erase any legal acknowledgement of transgender people, tax cuts for the rich that compound a growing wealth gap, legislation that will accelerate global warming even after decades of warnings from scientists. SOB is an unflinching and inclusive protest against those who hold the levers of power and fail to live up to the responsibility.
Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools in 1954, set off a cascade of progress for the American civil rights movement. It led to a series of SCOTUS decisions and legislative victories striking down bans on interracial marriage, protecting voting rights for minorities, and prohibiting housing discrimination. But Rosen’s wall painting Brown v. is positioned low on the wall, as to omit the case’s defendant. This compositional strategy impels the viewer to replace the Board with any of the countless systemic injustices that can still, even today, keep the American Dream just out of reach for Black and brown people. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, said “It seems to me…Brown changed everything and nothing at the same time.”
By leaving an empty space where we expect the N in Spring, Rosen creates the word SPRIG: a baby plant, green with promise, and plenty of room to grow (thanks to the missing N). Polls show that despite the anxiety that pervades the nation right now, Americans remain hopeful for the future. Early-morning Twitter outbursts continually punctuating yet more bigoted and wrong-headed behavior from the White House—siccing the military on peaceful protestors, retweeting a video of a supporter baying “White power!,” protecting Confederate monuments, calling the Black Lives Matter mural on Fifth Avenue a “symbol of hate,” proposing the injection of sunlight or disinfectant might yield a cure for coronavirus, rebranding the disease “kung flu,” trying to strip health insurance from millions of people by dismantling the Affordable Care Act during a global pandemic—have awakened the American people to the idea that perhaps a change of leadership would be a step in the right direction. Springtime might come early this year—perhaps on November 3. (But is voting for a Democrat really enough?)
The brilliance of Kay Rosen’s work lies in its ability to straddle both timeliness and timelessness. Meaning is forever mutable. Looking at these works again in ten years, in new contexts, they may be rallying for as-yet-unknown campaigns for equality, justice, freedom, science, generosity, and dignity. The world will have changed and hopefully for the better. But writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has a complicated relationship with hope—one we might do well to learn from:
I don’t ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don’t ever want to forget
that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the
resistors, almost always fails. I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal
victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger
story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know
it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me…No one—not our
fathers, not our police, and not our gods—is coming to save us. The worst really is
possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can’t happen.
And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility,
to keep screaming into the waves—just as my ancestors did.
Kay Rosen, born in Corpus Christi, lives and works in Gary, Indiana and New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Art Institute of Chicago, Aspen Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Drawing Center (New York), Dunedin Public Art Gallery (New Zealand), M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) (which hosted her mid-career survey exhibition Kay Rosen: Lifeli[k]e), Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles), and University Art Museum (U.C. Santa Barbara). She has been included in shows at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Kunsthalle Bielefeld (Germany), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (North Adams), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). Among the museums that own her work are the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney), Art Institute of Chicago, Cincinnati Art Museum, Collection Lambert (Avignon, France), Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Modern Art (New York), New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Progressive Corporation (Cleveland), and Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art (New York). Kay Rosen is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and is working on a commission for the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) to be unveiled in November of 2020.