The New Museum has a new installation on its exterior. The words “blues blood bruise” are a piece called, “A Small Band” (2015), by artist Glenn Ligon and was originally exhibited at the entrance to the Central Pavilion in the Giardini during Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 Venice Biennale. It’s now part of the museum’s upcoming exhibition, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, which was originally conceived by internationally renowned curator Okwui Enwezor, before he died of cancer in 2019.
The exhibit was postponed due to the pandemic but is now opening on February 17, 2021 with curatorial support from advisors Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash.
They write:
“Grief and Grievance” will be an intergenerational exhibition, bringing together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. The exhibition will further consider the intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance, as each structures and defines contemporary American social and political life. “Grief and Grievance” will comprise works encompassing video, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound, and performance made in the last decade, along with several key historical works and a series of new commissions created in response to the concept of the exhibition.
