KILLERS Part I: Memento Mori

According to a well-known anecdote, a German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist "chaos" of the painting, asked Picasso: "Did you do this?" Picasso calmly replied: "No, you did this!”

Oppression and violence are nothing new to America. And, of course, many artists - in particular those from marginalized and/or brutalized communities - have long grappled in their work with these awful forces. In the terrifying moment in which our nation now finds itself, we find renewed urgency to this project. This 2-part exhibition explores the large twin themes of violence and death, both fertile realms for artists past and present. In some cases, they are related, in others, possibly not, but it is the burden of the art in this exhibition to probe the connections. Is all art at bottom an effort to explain, fend off or come to terms with death; to commemorate, or communicate with, the dead; or to defy death by making something that lives on? The works assembled here embody the ongoing preoccupation of artists with some of the irresolvable mysteries that stir them to make art.

Can art that seethes with intensity, opening up very dark corners of our common experience, somehow seem appealing? Is the by now familiar determination to provoke or astonish necessarily at odds with the determination to produce an aesthetically impressive artifact? Our conviction is that the works we’ve assembled for our exhibition do justice to these concerns.