Living Just Enough, Goodman Gallery

Living Just Enough, 2020
Goodman Gallery
Group show

Goodman Gallery presents Living Just Enough, an exhibition which seeks to acknowledge and contextualise the current global reckoning with white supremacy and structural racism led by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The exhibition takes its title from a refrain in Stevie Wonder’s 1974 hit “Living for the City”. The song tells the story of a young Black man who moves to New York from Mississippi and his experiences of hardships born of systemic racism. These difficulties reflect challenges faced by black people around the world, which continue unabated to this day.

Living Just Enough features work by artists of varying generations who respond to these conditions from historic perspectives and in relation to the current global moment – a state of deepened rupture exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The diverse practices of each artist intersect with different forms of activism which oppose gender based violence, homophobia, transphobia and the erasure of the culture of indigenous peoples.

Through these intergenerational voices, the exhibition seeks to further conversations about the continuities and discontinuities that characterise the struggles of respective eras. Represented here are various collectives of Black artists whose work has redefined representation in the global art world. These include the US Civil Rights-era Black Arts Movement of which Faith Ringgold was associated; Fred Wilson and Lorraine O’Grady, who were part of the JAM (Just Above Midtown) laboratory artists of 1970s New York; Sonia Boyce, a member of the British Black Arts movement who articulated the voices of Black artists in the turbulent 1980s and the young South African collective NTU, which was formed in 2015 and includes artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Tabita Rezaire.

A number of featured artists point out possible next steps. In The Redefining the Power series, Kiluanji Kia Henda stages photographs of people on the empty plinths of Luanda where colonial statues once stood, questioning just how Africa wishes to position itself historically; possibly inventing a new history. Similarly, Thomas J Price’s figurative sculptures of imagined subjects – usually male and black – provides alternative ways of thinking about the prevalent culture of statues and monuments in the West. Tabita Rezaire’s Sorry for Real series addresses the politics around apologising for slavery and colonialism as well as associated calls for reparations.

These imagined amalgam heads atop glossy pearlised off-white automotive spray painted bases are cast in white acrylic composite, a pale, almost ghostly
plaster-like material that simultaneously evokes the luxury of marble surfaces
and the more provisional, layered history of raw plaster as a material for the
casting of statues. These works draw upon commonly understood hierarchies
between materials to explore social power structures and the way in which
status is ascribed within them.