CRASH PROOF: Curator’s Statement
“Can art really improve people’s lives?” continues to be a relevant question for me. Like many artists, I vacillate between a belief in the political efficacy of what we do and a cynicism that is reinforced daily by the seemingly endless supply of vacuous art. Is visual art even up to the epic task of transforming an inequitable social system? Doubtful. Then I remember being taken to see Diego Rivera’s Industry murals at the Detroit Art Institute when I was a kid. And I realize how profoundly images have influenced and even shaped my consciousness.
For this online exhibition, the challenge was to find art that spoke to the issue of global economic and sexual justice without resorting to the didactic, diagrammatic or the just plain dry. The artists included in CRASH PROOF—Chitra Ganesh, Deborah Grant, Esperanza Mayobre, Sheila Pepe, Mickalene Thomas, Fatimah Tuggar and the collective, fierce pussy—know how to cut through the visual clutter and convince us of their point of view. Through their smart, layered interrogations of gender, class and race, these artists prove once again that art can be both visually and politically compelling.
The work presented here utilizes many of the intersecting theoretical and formal innovations associated with Conceptual, Feminist and Identity art of the 1970s and 80s. Chitra Ganesh and Mickalene Thomas re-cast lived experience as staged, larger-than-life installations and photographs. Sheila Pepe and fierce pussy deploy ephemeral or “unmonumental” materials to disrupt the authority of public and/institutional space. Deborah Grant claims squatters’ rights on the patriarchal body of Modernist painting. The détournment of civic and domestic platitudes, through the manipulation of mediated imagery, is the chosen method of both Esperanza Mayobre and Fatimah Tuggar. Through the reinvention and reinvigoration of familiar critical strategies, the artists of CRASH PROOF manage to restore a sense of urgency to their underlying subjects and—perhaps more importantly—reconfirm our belief in the agency of art.
Thanks to the artists for their exceptional work and their participation in this project.
Carrie Moyer
January 2009
