In what Nelson calls his “weighted portrait of George Floyd,” a multitude of Black bodies become one. The bodily refrain “I Can’t Breathe” was already a cri de coeur of Black Lives Matter long before Derek Chaivin’s knee came anywhere near George Floyd’s neck, but in incorporating hundreds of years of racism’s visceral history, Nelson turns George Floyd’s body into a corporate body, a body whose blocked airway represents the suffering bodies of literally millions of other Black Americans. and before them, millions of unnamed enslaved people whose graves are marked, if at all, by periwinkle alone. It’s an omnibus image, what Elizabeth Alexander might call an “agglomerating spectacle” of Black lives cut short by white violence that incorporates not only the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Michael Brown and others but also assassinated 20th-century civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. And yet Nelson’s painting is also an archive. “Say Their Names,” Kadir Nelson’s haunting cover painting for last week’s The New Yorker, is but one of a torrent of unsettling images from the past month that have helped America better sense its legacy of white supremacy.
Kadir Nelson, ‘Say Their Names’ (2020) | Abraham Bosse, frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), courtesy of The British Museum Black Leviathan: Kadir Nelson’s “Say Their Names”
0 kommentar(er)
