Katie Cameron
A&E Editor
Cleveland, Oh. is best known for a river that caught on fire a couple of times, for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (the architectural equivalent of the Louvre’s kid sister) and for successfully building an economy on LeBron James. What Cleveland should be better known for is the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). The museum boasts 45,000 works of art spanning 6,000 years, all arranged in chronological order inside a gorgeous building with a breathtaking atrium and most importantly, general admission is free.
On Saturday, Sept. 10, the museum unveiled its newest exhibition, titled The Ecstasy of St. Kara. The exhibition features the work of contemporary artist Kara Walker, an artist famous for her discussions of race, identity and gender. Her latest exhibition is no exception.
The exhibition was in part inspired by Walker’s recent trip to Rome, but it was largely inspired by the recent string of violent killings of black men in the United States by police officers. The exhibition depicts connections Walker sees between religion, slavery, martyrdom and violence by police forces. Walker featured an essay titled “Assassination by Proxy” alongside her work, in which she explains her belief that the violence against black men is derived out of racial anxieties surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency.
“I fear that Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and all the rest were killed as proxies for the Black President,” said Walker. Tamir Rice, 12, was killed by a Cleveland police officer two years ago after being seen holding a toy gun in a park.
The museum warns visitors that some of the material in the exhibition is graphic, and may not be suitable for a younger audience. Walker compares a photograph of a dying Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man who was fatally shot by Minnesotan police at a traffic stop, in a bloodstained t-shirt with images of Italian sculptures of martyrs and saints.
Walker’s work is designed to provoke thought and cause outrage about the violence aimed at black men in America and often plays into extremes and stereotypes to incite that outrage.
She compares Castile to Italian martyrs and their physical relics in hopes that this will incite action against this violence, but wonders “whether we must carry the rotting bodies of the fallen through the streets” to have the same effect. The comparison forces her audience to consider how much society values the lives of the dead men.
One of Walker’s drawings depicts a charred tombstone labelled “BLM” for the Black Lives Matter movement. The CMA has no official stance on the Black Lives Matter movement, and the curator and assistant curator of contemporary art at the museum have made statements defending the exhibition from critics who believe its subject matter is too topical. Instead, they contend that it points to how deeply rooted racism and violence are in history.
The CMA is less than an hour drive away from Wooster.This year marks the museum’s centennial anniversary. The two dozen drawings featured in The Ecstasy of St. Kara will be on display now through Dec. 31, 2016.