The Aesthetics of a Culture of Violence & Protest

In mounting the exhibition “Unmasked: Anti-Lynching Art and Public Community Remembrance in Indiana,” the curators posed the question: How can visual art create awareness of lynching and community response? How can local and state-wide exhibitions and events dovetail with national ones? The challenge of displaying images of lynching – whether photography or illustration, although they both carry separate sets of concerns – is that there’s an understandable fatigue with images of violent Black death, which the use of video has made increasingly commonplace nowadays. Videos, photographs, and other visual formats bring awareness to violence, but society needs much more than images to combat white supremacy. Images can only do so much. They also raise their own set of issues. In displaying art that foregrounds violence against Black people, concerns about voyeurism and perpetuating the “entertainment” of the lynching attends to these artworks. Do they replicate this dehumanization, or can they lead us to ponder the humanity of the victims and their community? Does the artist choose to show the victim’s body, or divert attention to the crowd? These questions concerned the artists involved in the two anti-lynching exhibitions in 1935, and they continue to be asked by artists today. Our exhibition queries, how do concerns about viewing this work influence our need to continue to understand this history and how we confront future instances of racial violence? When do we look, and when do we look away? How might this exhibition inform future acts of memorialization and recognition of racial violence?