Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice
Teaching Gallery
Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice explores how art and art institutions contribute to transitional justice by confronting histories of racist violence and their legacies today. Transitional justice aims to free political culture from the trappings of the past, but requires that aggressors and aggrieved confront each other, joining in recognition, reparation, and reconciliation. As a source of constructed racial meanings and related identities and behaviors, art can be implicated in racist violence (cultural, institutional, and interpersonal), but can also promote norms of anti-racism and related social change. Truths and Reckonings is an exploratory intervention into public memory, where artworks and objects on display grapple with difficult truths—relating to colonialism, enslavement, lynching, and their legacies—bearing witness to their harms and facilitating the processing of traumas we embody and reproduce.
The installation brings a selection of artworks that address racism from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection—including Rashid Johnson’s Thurgood in the Hour of Chaos (2009) and Kara Walker and Klaus Bürgel’s Golddigger (2003)—into conversation with selected objects from the Washington University Libraries, such as Thomas Nast’s 1864 political cartoon “Compromise with the South” and the Documenting Ferguson digital archive. Drawing on the Museum’s ability to shape understandings of history, including relations between time and place, this installation considers how critical artworks and their presentation facilitate reckoning with the presence of the past and contribute to repair.
Truths and Reckonings: The Art of Transformative Racial Justice is curated by Geoff Ward, associate professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with his seminar “Monumental Anti-Racism” in spring 2020.
Selected works

Klaus Bürgel
Golddigger
2003
Kara Walker
The Bush, Skinny, and De-boning, from Edition No. 19
2002
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways
1993
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways
1993
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways
1993
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways
1993
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways
1993
Glenn Ligon
Untitled, from the portfolio Runaways
1993
Glenn Ligon
Untitled (Two White/Two Black)
1992
Glenn Ligon
Untitled (Two White/Two Black)
1992
Glenn Ligon
Untitled (Two White/Two Black)
1992
Glenn Ligon
Untitled (Two White/Two Black)
1992
Bruce Davidson
Mrs. Annie Blackman holding baby Felicia inside her sharecropper cabin, near Selma, Alabama
1965, printed later
Bruce Davidson
Arrest of a demonstrator in Birmingham, Alabama
1963, printed later
Lewis Hine
Child of a Sharecropper’s Family
c. 1920
Madeline Osborne
A Shack for Negroes Only at Belle Glade, FLA.
1945
Rashid Johnson
Thurgood in the Hour of Chaos, from the portfolio America America
2009
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds
Telling Many Magpies, Telling Black Wolf, Telling Hachivi
1989
Howardena Pindell
Free, White and 21
1980
Andy Warhol
Birmingham Race Riot, from the portfolio X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters)
1964Online Exhibition
Teaching Gallery
The Teaching Gallery is a space in the Kemper Art Museum dedicated to presenting works from the Museum's collection with direct connections to Washington University courses. Teaching Gallery installations are intended to serve as parallel classrooms and can be used to supplement courses through object-based inquiry, research, and learning. Learn more