“Infinite Hope,” running through March 1 at Minnesota Street Project, is a shining example of how art can take a stand
Art is political. Some explicitly so, others implicitly, whether directly critiquing power structures or representing disenfranchised identities.Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, the new administration moved quickly to roll back federal initiatives aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion. Art is being directly impacted. Both the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution have shuttered their DEI offices in compliance with an executive order. Trump’s administration has also disbanded the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and issued new guidelines for National Endowment for the Arts grants impacting funding for underserved communities..The photography exhibition “Infinite Hope,” presented by Jenkins Johnson Gallery at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco’s Dogpatch through March 1, is a shining example of how art can take a radical stand against such disappointments. The show surveys the work of four seminal African American photographers: Kwame Brathwaite, Renée Cox, Gordon Parks and Ming Smith. More than 70 photographs taken between 1951 and 2009 fill the 6,000-square-foot gallery space, a museum-scale effort that offers as much in the way of the history of photography and politics as it does a record of the Black American experience of the 20th century. Each artist takes a different approach to the subject of Black life, each in their own way commemorating the past, documenting the present, and imagining a possible future. Parks’ photographs are mostly concerned with capturing the Civil Rights Movement, from portraits of Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X, to scenes of family life in the South. In one sweeping photograph of the 1963 March on Washington, thousands of people gather on the National Mall, the Washington Monument towering behind them. The composition of the image presents the mixed-race crowd as the literal underpinning of American democracy, opposing a system of power built on inequality. Smith’s black-and-white portraits feature both everyday folks and celebrities, from the writer James Baldwin to the jazz musician David Murray, and give them equal treatment. The emphasis isn’t on their statuses, but on the humanity she captures in their faces, giving us the feeling that we might know them intimately. Ex // Top Stories Despite defeat, locals still seek to hold U.S. accountable for role in Gaza One year and two losses later, a San Francisco law firm is still aiming to hold the U.S. accountable for supplying Israel with arms amid its war with Hamas Longtime reporter's book on homelessness leads with compassion Kevin Fagan makes an impassioned case for the importance of treating our fellow citizens, however downtrodden, with dignity and respect Why SF renters pay more amid stagnant market Even as tens of thousands of people moved out of The City in recent years, the rent burden weighing down tenants has only grown heavier In “Brown Girl Dreaming,” 1991, Smith augments the photograph of a girl standing at the base of a Ferris wheel by painting the amusement park ride orange and yellow, literally lighting up like a halo behind the girl’s head and rendering the power of art to make dreams manifest. The documentary quality of Parks’ and Smith’s photographs works as a powerful narrative device to tell a story of the Black American experience as one of hope, resilience and humanity. Cox and Brathwaite achieve this in their carefully crafted, staged photographs, too. Cox portrays herself in the roles of various characters, from Raje — Wonder Woman’s long-lost sister who appears in one 1998 photo sitting atop the Statue of Liberty — to the 18th-century Jamaican freedom fighter Queen Nanny. In a photo titled “The Discreet Charm of the Bougie,” Cox appears dressed to the nines in an opulent living room — a white woman in a maid’s outfit waiting on her. In each picture, Cox embodies and upends cultural narratives to center Blackness. In his dreamy, 1970s portraits of Black models, Brathwaite lavishes beauty on his subjects to create a feeling that they are larger than life. In “Untitled ,” a Black couple admires each other against a defuse, rosy backdrop, the love in their eyes enough hope for anyone. Brathwaite also shot street scenes of shopkeepers and playing children as well as famous musicians like Bob Marley and Roberta Flack, maintaining in all his pictures an eye for their unique beauty. It is this attention and care to his subjects that shows us just how much representation matters. Emboldened by the current administration’s attitude towards diversity as an unnecessary concern, I expect other art organizations will follow suit, gladly abandoning what they view as a burdensome “woke agenda.” I also expect many arts institutions to fight back. “Infinite Hope” is a shining example of how art can be a mode of resistance through representation. In one of Parks’ photographs, dated 1963, a Black man in the center of a crowd on the streets of Harlem brandishes an issue of the American Black Muslim newspaper Muhammad Speaks, bearing the bold headline “OUR FREEDOM CAN’T WAIT.” It’s a sentiment that rings as true today as it surely did 60 years ago. The man’s facial expression is caught somewhere between a grin and a grimace, a mixture of lament and perseverance in the face of his own dehumanization. Parks used his camera “to produce a picture of the world that would be so moving and so persuasive,” said the art critic Maurice Berger, in a 2021 HBO documentary,“that it could move people to change their views, to push back against the racism that they saw around them, to give themselves a sense of pride in the face of that racism.” The same can be said for all the photographers in “Infinite Hope.” But we cannot rest on the laurels of that radicality. Instead, we must see it as a call to action. Because freedom can’t wait.
Jenkins Johnson Gallery Minnesota Street Project Art San Francisco Art Renée Cox Gordon Parks Ming Smith Kwame Brathwaite
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