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|a Inclusion is a good norm. The release of energies hitherto pent-up by exclusion lies behind the Afro-Atlantic transmutations performed by such artists as Lauren Halsey, Oscar Murillo and Paul Sepuya, to name a few – yet this cannot be a triumphalist story because the past decade also gave us a neoliberal racial formation that no longer even tries to clothe its violent antiblackness. Untitled (Underpainting, 2018) reveals Kerry James Marshall’s insight into such antinomy. In the mirroring spaces of a beaux-arts museum filled with black viewers, spliced between Barnett Newman zips featuring wall texts, the archival shell of Western art comes to house an energetic scene of civic assembly. The utopian feeling emanating from the scene’s unrealism has everything to do with the condition of unfinishedness, for what leaps out of the visual maze of symmetry and asymmetry is a sense of future possibility that questions the limits of the present. — KM. © 2017, University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
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