Interview
Lynching Postcards Explores a Dark Corner of US History
Director Christine Turner explains to Hyperallergic how her documentary short interrogates the white gaze and seeks to reaffirm some ugly truths about the past.
lynching
History
How a Dutch Painting Dominates the Way We See a 17th-Century Lynching
Jan de Baen's “The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers” has become the dominant visual representation of the brothers’ lynching, but whether it deserves this honor is debatable.
Art
What We Can Learn From a Vanished Mural of Racist Violence
John Wilson’s 1952 mural “The Incident,” is a salient meditation on the horrors of lynching and though physically lost, the mural endures in archival images, preliminary sketches, and studies.
Opinion
When a Lynching Memorial Becomes a Photo Opportunity
A reflection on the commodification of Jim Crow's violence through public memorials.
Art
A New Website Tells the Stories of Over 4,000 Lynchings in the United States
The Equal Justice Initiative, with the support of Google, launched an online interactive that visualizes lynchings from the Civil War to World War II in 20 American states.
Art
Creating a Spatial History of Slavery through Abstraction
Minimalist abstraction of the 20th century often feels placeless. Tony Smith's angular, inky sculptures could have crawled out of a dimension void of organic life; Mark Rothko's repeating black canvases in a Houston chapel reflected the space's lack of specific religion.
Performance
Early Anti-Lynching Plays, Read in Light of Ferguson
Just two days before the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) released its report "Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror," I sat in the audience at JACK in Brooklyn for a reading of playwright Mary P. Burrill's 1919 anti-lynching play Aftermath.