The Art Angle Podcast: Four Artists on the Front Lines of the George Floyd Protests

by admin

Jun 5, 2020

artnet

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

As American citizens entered Memorial Day weekend this year, the
nation was already in turmoil. Nearly 100,000 lives had been lost
to a colossal public-health crisis, with a disproportionately high
number of the victims being African American; tens of millions of
people had filed for unemployment since mid-March; and many states
central to the US economy remained largely locked down, with few
solid indications of when they would resume anything resembling
business as usual.

Then, after a Minnesota deli owner accused George Floyd of
buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill on Memorial Day, the
four police officers who responded to the call suffocated Floyd on
camera during his arrest—and the national conversation immediately
pivoted to America’s original and deadliest sin: institutional
racism.

Although Floyd’s death has now become the centerpiece of perhaps
the broadest-based US protest movement since the Vietnam War, the
tensions between (mostly) white authorities and communities of
color has been building for centuries. In fact, another unarmed
black American, 26-year-old healthcare worker Breonna Taylor, was
killed in her own bed by Louisville police just days before Floyd’s
murder. The fatalities offer fresh proof of the lethal
discrimination that has shaped American history since its
beginning. But they have also quickly shifted widespread concerns
for safety from COVID-19 to widespread demands for justice and
systemic change from police and all levels of government.

On the first Friday of the demonstrations sparked by the Floyd
tragedy, Artnet News’s art and design editor Noor Brara sought out
a wide variety of artists willing to share their stories from the
protests (and beyond). By the following Monday morning, she had
gathered personal accounts from 18 artists that
ranged from the painful, to the terrifying, to the uplifting as
they joined (or continued) in the movement for action.

On this week’s episode of the Art Angle, Brara brings four of
those stories to our listeners, in their own words.
Artists Ebony Brown, Candy Kerr, Marcus Leslie Singleton,
and Darryl Westly—all black Americans—spoke to Artnet News
about the devastating repetitions of history, the fatigue of trying
to educate white America, and how their protest experiences shape
their artistic practices.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)