The People Vs. Kelley Walker

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This under-planned, poorly executed, elementary level artwork that uses Black women and men as props and controversy starters is over-intellectualized by classist, utterly inept, pompous, and clueless curator types. The world of art gets no more white and privileged than this.’ So wrote black activist artist Damon Davis in September 2016, as he called for a boycott of Direct Drive, Kelley Walker’s survey exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM).1 Davis was protesting the inclusion of decade-old works in which images of black people were obscured by smears of chocolate and toothpaste.

In the United States, the drama around Walker’s show would be just one in a string of rows over ‘privileged white artists’ presuming to represent or speak for ‘Others’ in their work. Earlier in the year, Cindy Sherman had been in the crosshairs for adopting ‘black face’ in Bus Riders, an art-on-buses project she made as a twenty-two-year old back in 1976. Hashtag Cindygate. In 2017, there would be outrage at the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket—based on a famous photo of the disfigured corpse of 1950s child martyr Emmett Till—in the Whitney Biennial. Artist Parker Bright became an Instagram hit standing before the painting, blocking the view, wearing a t-shirt inscribed ‘Black Death Spectacle’ and ‘No Lynch Mob’. Artist Hannah Black called for the painting to be not only dropped from the show but destroyed. Then, Sam Durant got into strife for installing his 2012 gallows sculpture, Scaffold, in the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He said he wanted white people to acknowledge a shameful mass hanging of Dakota Indians in 1862. But, the Indian community itself—not consulted—did... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Black Star Press (rotated 90 degrees), 2006. Digital print with silkscreened white, milk, and dark chocolate on canvas, triptych, each panel 83 x 104 inches.
Courtesy the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

schema; Aquafresh plus Crest with Whitening Expressions (Trina), 2006. CD Rom with colour poster, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.