Truths and Reckonings
2020-09-27 • Liam Otten
“Amnesia is not the right word,” said Geoff K. Ward, “because we’ve forgotten without ever really knowing.”
Ward, professor of African and African American studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was discussing Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice, the exhibition he curated for the University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
Located in the Kemper Art Museum’s Teaching Gallery, Truths and Reckonings confronts histories of racist violence with the aim of untangling their continuing legacies. The exhibition features archival photos, newspaper articles, political cartoons, and other materials, as well as contemporary works—by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Rashid Johnson, Howardena Pindell, and Kara Walker, among others—that explore the intersections of art and social justice.
“Americans are so practiced at looking the other way,” Ward said. “Many think, ‘We’ve dealt with this, we’re post-racial, there’s no need to look back.’
“But today that’s no longer plausible,” Ward added. “This exhibit was designed as a counter-memory—and a rebuttal—to such motivated ignorance.”