This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
To enter Kehinde Wiley’s show “An Archaeology of Silence” is to step into darkness, where only the art itself seems to emit light.
The space feels somewhere between a crypt and a cathedral, featuring paintings and bronze sculptures of reclining Black bodies, spread out in repose or entombed like corpses, that appear to glow from within.
The show, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, culminates with a monumental sculpture of a fallen man on horseback, draped over the horse as if he had just been shot, his Nikes dangling below the saddle.
Made in the year after George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis, this monument — and more broadly, the show as a whole — confronts the “legacy and scope of anti-Black violence,” according to Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.
Persons:
George Floyd, Darren Walker
Organizations:
Museum of Fine Arts, Ford Foundation
Locations:
Houston, Minneapolis