Blog Post #1. Laura James Paints What America Wants to Forget

    In the Hyperallergic article, “Laura James Paints What America Wants to Forget,” Alexandra M. Thomas discusses the featured artist Laura James and her practice to preserve Black Americans culture in her works as the US government threatens to suppress and sanitize the country’s history of antiblack racial violence.Laura James is an Antiguan Black multidisciplinary artist from Bronx and the founder of BX200 Bronx Visual Artist Directory. In 1999, she launched her ongoing series “American History” after learning about the brutal lynching of James Byrd Jr. at the hands of white supremacists.


    One of Laura James' recent new paintings for the series, “Not Even Past” confronts the normalized dismissiveness towards black people to simply “move on” from systematic racism and slavery when it is deeply entrenched within American society and still affects Black Americans to this day. The painting depicts the various scenes of antiblack violence throughout American history from the lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and police brutality to the more subtle forms of racism through racial bias, indoctrination, and racial profiling while on the other hand also memorializes on the Black Americans in history who fell victim to the ongoing violence. 

    The importance of the painting in depicting the scenes in explicit detail is brought up when the Trump Administration are attempting to suppress and sanitize American's history of slavery and racial oppression. If the documentations of these events that happened in history were to be wiped from the educational texts, then no one will be able to fathom the extent of inhuman cruelty and crimes that went unpunished for years, which is why works like these are crucial to resisting against the ongoing censorship. They serve as a visual archive to look back on, and to be taken into account to making sure that the history does not repeat itself again. It's not something to look away from, it's something to learn from and we have to make sure to keep a record for it to remember.
 

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