Installation View : In Plain Sight/Site at Art Space, New Haven, CT.
Surrounded by in Fawundu’s work, there is a feeling of heaviness—no way to get one’s arms around all that history. Some moments are small and mundane, some are world-changing.
An everyday article details a lynching and an advertisement proclaims “The Magnificent Painting of the Massacre on board the Amistad.” Suffragettes march in the streets. Black protesters picket outside a screening of Gone with the Wind. Shirley Chisholm makes a campaign speech.In Plain Sight, Artspace Lays History Bare by Leah Andelsman, Dec. 4, 2018,
With a screenprint, Fawundu has placed the Black gaze on all of that history, all the good and the bad, the hard-won victories and the constant indignities. And there’s something empowering in that. There’s an unspoken commentary on each image, a silent judgement passed by the figures. These Black women are in the driver’s seat. The images touch and sometimes obscure the text itself. Fawundu seems to be saying: “I won’t let us be invisible anymore, because we were there.”
Arts Council Greater New Haven
