The Speed Museum’s “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” Exhibit Captures Breonna Taylor’s Spirit Radiating Out Rage, Sadness, and Hope Into The Black Lives Matter Movement
by Heather Cassell
Tamika Palmer was in awe and comforted when the exhibit, “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” opened at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum earlier this spring.
It “is everything she hoped it would be,” she told National Public Radio, calling the exhibit centered around her daughter Breonna Taylor, who was taken away from her way too soon, “peaceful.”
“To be able to come to this place and just be filled with her spirit,” she said.
Tamika is the grieving mother of Breonna, the young emergency room technician killed by the city’s police during a no-knock warrant in the middle of the night while she slept March 13, 2020.
Breonna wearing the flowing aquamarine dress stepping out toward you is all you see upon entering the museum. The 54-inch-tall by 43-inch-wide painting of Breonna by artist Amy Sherald in the Jasmine Elder dress wearing the engagement ring from her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, that she never got to see sparkling on her finger, is mesmerizing and full of life and joy, just as Breonna was in life.
The painting is recognizable. It was originally commissioned for the cover of September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair.
Breonna was never able to say yes. She was not aware of the diamond ring Kenneth bought to put on the 26-year-old Black woman’s finger as he proposed to her.
The painting stands alone with the biographical timeline of Breonna’s life that her mother created for the exhibit.
The painting and exhibit are truly Breonna’s stepping out. It is the first time the painting is on public display.
It is also the first time Kentucky’s largest and oldest museum cleared out its main galleries to exhibit contemporary Black art.
Breonna’s Black girl magic flows from the painting in waves radiating out toward the three main exhibit rooms showcasing Black artists addressing the themes of her life – promise, witness, and remembrance – shared by many African Americans.
Each gallery individually explores a solitary theme, but the themes and the rooms are all connected to Breonna’s portrait. The painting can be seen from every room and each space flows back to it.
“The killing of Breonna Taylor and a year of protests have really changed the course of Louisville, and we’re struggling,” Stephen Reily, the Speed’s director, told the New York Times. “Our goal and ambition is to use the work of great artists to help process what we’ve been through and collectively find a way forward.”
The Show
Speed’s main galleries with 22-foot ceilings, terrazzo floors, and marble doorways typically showcase the museum’s permanent collection of Dutch and Flemish artists on each side of the central atrium’s sculpture garden.
This spring is different. The exhibit celebrating Louisville’s daughter, Breonna’s life, and Black artists has transformed the galleries from a remembrance of past white male artists to showcasing 30 contemporary nearly all Black artists’ works. The works address America’s promise, witness crimes against Black people, and remember those lost to gun violence and police brutality.
“It became clear that an effect would be a kind of decolonizing of that museum space,” guest curator Allison Glenn, who is associate curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, told the Times.
“To have a contemporary exhibition by majority Black artists in this space acts as a decolonization of these galleries,” Allison said.
Some of the artists featured in the exhibit are well-known and some are lesser known, they are joined by Black artists artwork from Speed’s own collection. A few of the artists have Louisville connections.
Some of the better known artists on display include Kerry James Marshall, whose works recontextualize Western art history from the Renaissance to 20th-century American Abstraction, and Lorna Simpson, whose works span from painting to sculpture to filmmaking.
Some of the other artists works in the exhibit are Nari Ward, who is known for his sculptural installations created from everyday repurposed materials; Bethany Collins, whose works explore how race and language interact altering official documents, such as newspapers and books, to examine and critique history and contemporary issues, such as police brutality, for “truth” and “completeness of official record” in her pieces; and Jon-Sesrie Goff, a multidisciplinary artist who integrates social engagement, film, moving image, performance, photography, and installation in his works.
The exhibit also features works from the Speed’s permanent collection and local photographers.
Allison found works by Black artists associated with the city stored away in its repositories and pulled them for the exhibit, reported the Times.
The works included a 1969 painting by Sam Gilliam, who grew up in Louisville; Louisville native who now lives in New York, Noel W. Anderson’s works utilizing images from vintage Ebony magazines; and a bronze bust of a Black Union soldier by Ed Hamilton, who still lives in the city.
Works by local photographers who covered last year’s Black Lives Matter protests in Louisville that elevated Breonna’s name into the American civil rights cannon alongside George Floyd, the Minneapolis Black man who was murdered by local police officers, make up part of the “Witness” section of the exhibit.
The exhibit coincided with the trial of the officer who killed George.
Promise
The room explores the American dream and myth offered up, but an ideology that has been more of a conception than something achieved for many. Systematic racism and centuries of more than willful exclusion of people of color while at the same time taking everything they have to offer this country without credit is brought to light through the artwork for every visitor to acknowledge and talk about.
Nari’s piece utilizes colorful shoelaces spelling out the beginning words of the United States’ Constitution, “We the People” he created in 2011.
While multiple versions of the “Star Spangled Banner” in Bethany’s work, “The Star Spangled Banner: A Hymnal” (2020), a laser smudges the ink that form the notes and words and cuts the words of the national anthem. The work is a part of her new artist book that will feature 100 versions of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the U.S. national anthem since 1931. Written by Francis Scott Key in 1814, the song has undergone several variations between the 18th and 21st centuries. The book offers a “reflection on patriotism, belonging, and individual position within national identity.”
Hank Willis Thomas’ flags flank the doorway of the exhibit. The two flags represent deaths represented by the stars due to gun violence in the US for the years represented, 2019 there were 15,433 deaths, and in 2020 there were 19,281, according to the museum’s video about the exhibit.
Witness
History and art are captured in the second gallery, themed “Witness.” Photographs taken during Louisville Black Lives Matter protests by Erik Branch, Xavier Burrell, Jon P. Cherry, Tyler Gerth (1992-2020) and T.A. Yero document the history as it was happening to references of history more than a century ago demonstrating what has not changed.
“I made the decision that I wasn’t going to show any work that was traumatizing in the exhibition,” Allison told the Times. “But I also had to be clear that I couldn’t edit the archive when it came to the protest photographs.”
The late artivist Terry Adkins’ drum sculpture, “Muffled Drums,” on display harks back to a National Association of the Advancement of Colored People’s Silent Protest Parade, also known as the Silent March, against a “national plague of lynchings.” The parade, proposed to the NAACP by an unnamed woman, Allison said in the museum’s video about the exhibit, was one of the first marches for Black lives in the US, took over New York’s 5th Avenue in June 1917.
Remembrance
The third gallery is hushed in a meditation from the dimly lit room to the limited number of artworks displayed remember the lives of those lost to police brutality and/or gun violence and their legacies, Allison said.
The artwork depicts memorials from Jon-Sesrie’s video, “A Site of Reckoning: Battlefield,” exploring the 2016 mass shooting at Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s painting “Butterfly Eyes (for Breonna Taylor) from the series in the year of the pandemic, in the month of the awakening, 2021.”
The show does not end with the painting of Breonna or the quiet reflection and memory of violence and lives lost. The exhibit ends with artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph’s thought provoking two-channel video, “BLKNWS®,” displayed in a bright room with an outdoor view, one flight down, reported the Times. The video provides a jarring alternative view of what gets edited out of or misrepresented in stories by the media about Black lives,
Painting Breonna
Painting Breonna’s portrait was special to Amy. It was her way to finally joint the protests and speak out about Black Lives Matter. The artist, mostly known for her portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, had a heart transplant in 2012.
The Michelle Obama portrait is about to go on a five-city tour with the Kehinde Wiley portrait of Barack Obama, starting in June, reported the Times.
Amy’s first solo West Coast exhibition, “Amy Sherald The Great American Fact,” a collection of her current works, at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Los Angeles is also currently on display until June 6.
Vulnerable to the virus, it was unsafe for the 48-year-old artist to go out into the streets during last summer’s protests and the global pandemic.
Giving voice to someone who was no longer living was a first for Amy, whom Breonna’s portrait is only her second commission.
The painting was a way for her “to have a voice and to give Breonna Taylor a voice,” Amy told the Times.
She dove into Breonna’s life examining photographs, video, and audio recordings provided by her family and had many conversations with Tamika, the young Black woman’s mother, about her life.
She learned that Breonna was a “diva” who liked getting dressed up, she told the Times.
“So, I thought it was fitting that she have on a beautiful dress,” said Amy.
But the dress for Breonna’s portrait could not be just any dress by any designer. Breonna was a Black woman. Amy is a Black woman. The designer had to be a Black woman.
She chose a dress made by Atlanta-based designer Jasmine at JIBRI.
Amy wanted Breonna to really be seen.
“I decided to go with turquoise, and then with a background that was the same color, because it really allowed you to focus on her face and look in her eyes,” Amy told the Times.
It was from these materials Amy created the iconic image of the young woman who became the female face of police brutality for the Black Lives Movement.
She painted Breonna in that beautiful aquamarine dress gazing, unapologetically, directly at the viewer.
“She has this kind of otherworldly feel, kind of ethereal, very peaceful,” Amy said.
Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, who is now the Smithsonian’s secretary, told the Times that Amy’s painting of Taylor “captured both the joy and the pain of this moment.”
“This is a story that needs to be told and needs to be retold,” Lonnie added noting if it went into a private collection it might disappear after receiving a little attention. “This way, generations are going to understand the story of this woman and the story of this period.”
Curating The Now
“Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” was not a typical experience putting together an exhibit.
“It was a different kind of curatorial process: I wasn’t necessarily trying to drive a thesis based on research into an idea or an artist,” Allison told the Times. “It was really built on conversations about how a museum can get it right, how the art world can respond, what does it mean to collaborate in this space.”
Police brutality and racism and the people most affected by the issue were intentionally integral to the show, especially Breonna’s family.
Museums “tend to underestimate radical shifts in awareness of, and interest in, the past,” Allison said.
It was Allison and Toya Northington’s, the museum’s community engagement strategist, idea to decolonize the galleries in the Speed, a museum that historically has not “been known for their support for the Black community and marginalized communities,” Allison told NPR.
It was also important to Allison and Toya to bring the community together, the national Black artists community, the local Louisville community, and Breonna’s family to produce the exhibit.
Breonna’s mother, Tamika, sister, Ju’Niyah Palmer, and aunt, Bianca Austin, helped develop the show.
Black artists Theaster Gates, Jon-Sesrie, Hank, La Keisha Leek, Raymond Green, and Amy were among the artists who served on the national advisory committee.
Toya developed the local advisory committee with artists, activists, and community leaders.
All of the advisory committee members, including Allison were no strangers to gun violence.
The Times reported, Allison lost her brother to gun violence about a year and a half ago. The circumstances of her brother’s death helped with her approach to and informed the show, she told the newspaper.
Theaster’s father took over the Mother Emanuel AME congregation in Charleston after the 2016 shooting. Hank lost his cousin to gun violence 20 years ago and has created works from his experience. Allison’s friend, La Keisha, was in grad school when her cousin Trayvon Martin was killed. Raymond is a cousin of Alton Sterling who was fatally shot by white police officers in Baton Rouge.
“That experience of loss from gun violence or policy brutality — or both — brings a level of care,” Allison said.
The challenge of bringing the community together around Breonna’s memory was not easy, but Toya pushed through the community’s reluctance and built a Louisville-based steering planning committee and team of researchers.
Out of all of the disagreements and compromises bringing the show to life, the committees agreed the show should feature predominantly Black artists.
“That was the number one requirement,” Toya said.
The experience presented a rare opportunity, Allison told the Times. It presented an opportunity to “show what it means to listen,” she said.
“When you listen, you provide opportunities for accessibility, for inroads, for connection,” she continued.
The coalition brought the exhibit to life in four months. The show coincided with the criminal trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd, a Black man that ignited global anti-racism and anti-police brutality movements.
The hope is to show “museums can get it right,” Allison said, without losing curatorial quality, but improving it by involving community, including communities excluded from institutions in the past.
The Future of Museums
Usually, museums plan out exhibits at least two years in advance leaving little to no room to pivot and respond to current events.
Instead of being relevant, museums are becoming relics and losing followers.
The distinctive quality of this exhibit is it is incredibly unique in several ways and it also points toward a path as a possible model for the future for museums.
First, the exhibit is current, addressing issues that are happening now through art; nearly all of the artist’s works are Black artists; the exhibit and Amy’s painting brought together two communities and unusual funding partnerships; and the show came together in a total of four months.
Amy’s painting was purchased by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC and the Speed with the help of a $1 million donation by the Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation. The museums will share the painting.
The Ford Foundation make an additional $1.2 million grant beyond the purchase of the Breonna painting to fund the Speed’s community programs and provide free admission for the public to the exhibit.
The Hearthland Foundation is run by actress Kate Capshaw and her husband, the director Steven Spielberg.
Amy is developing a program with the guidance of the two foundations to support students interested in social justice who are pursuing higher education, reported the Times. Sales from the Breonna painting will be directed toward the program.
As the Times Art Critic Holland Cotter noted, museums are struggling to keep their galleries open. The institutions need a strategy to move into the future by attracting new audiences. The Speed’s “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” could present the model for the future.
The exhibit is showing now through June 6. It is open to the public free.
The next virtual afterhours touring the museum’s collections and exhibit on the museum’s Facebook and YouTube channels is 6 to 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on May 21.
THE GAZE:
Speed Museum, 2035 South 3rd Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40208. 502-634-2700. . speedmuseum.org.
TYPE OF EVENT: Exhibit
RATING: 4-stars (scale 0-5)
VIBE: Peaceful
SCENE: Come as you are to enjoy art.
SERVICE: Access to the event was important due to distance and the global pandemic. The museum offered a couple of virtual nights to explore the exhibit online.
DAZZLE ME AGAIN: The exhibit is impressive due to the collection pulled together in record time for a show. Of course, the central piece, Amy’s painting of Breonna, but I enjoyed being introduced to many other amazing Black artists’ works.
WHERE TO NEXT?: There are no known plans for the exhibit to travel.
THE TICKET: $ = Under $10
WORTH THE OUTTING?: This was a rock’n good time!
Book your next art exploration with Girls That Roam Travel. Contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at 415-517-7239 or at .
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