NEWS

Since kicking off in late June, this ambitious citywide venture, organized by the Racial Imaginary Institute, has encompassed a symposium, an artists’ residency, a documentary studio, a film series, a performance program, a reading group, and a cookout. (There’s even a mixtape, available at the gallery 47 Canal.) The vital group show at the heart of it all considers whiteness as a kind of narcissistic disorder—lacking empathy and paranoid about losing power, despite being malignantly powerful—in the works of seventeen artists whose racial diversity is a canny curatorial gambit. Tone varies from comic (Cindy Sherman’s portraits of desperately age-defying women, Seung-Min Lee’s wildly entertaining mockumentary about milk) to soulful (Native Art Department International’s video of a ceremonial dance performed by Dennis Redmoon Darkeem) to chilling (Ken Gonzales-Day’s vintage image of a crowd at a lynching, digitally altered to remove the victim from the scene). Paul Chan’s quivering trio of rising and falling white-robed figures—a figment achieved with fabric and fans—are cautionary mascots of inflated self-worth and defensive fragility.