Write-up in SF Weekly by art critic Jonathan Curiel on my recent museum solo art exhibit, Antebellum Appropriations, at Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, which ran from April 29 – June 25, 2017.
Excerpt from the review:
Michael Jackson Remains Invincible
A series of exhibits at MoAD look at Michael Jackson through the lens of “mental colonialism,” and at the construction of narrative in Africa.
. . . That state of questioning is also inherent in two parallel MoAD exhibits that are equally thought-provoking and visually rousing . . .
Lili Bernard. Caroline (after Édouard Manet’s Olympia, 1863), 2012. Oil on Canvas, 63”x96”
Lili Bernard’s MoAD exhibit, “Lili Bernard: Antebellum Appropriations,” reworks well-known European paintings into epic scenes that depict the physical and sexual brutality that slaves endured. But she also depicts liberation, when former slaves are leading others or enacting revenge.
In Carlota Slaying the Slaver (after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1612), Bernard has a naked, shackled woman take a knife to her slaveholder’s genitals while two other women thrust a sword into his neck and another woman holds a white witness at bay. During her early life, Artemisia Gentileschi — a vaunted, 17th-century Italian painter — was raped, then took her rapist to trial and won. Art scholars have said that Judith Slaying Holofernes is a manifestation of Gentileschi’s public experience as a rape victim, but the work is considered a masterpiece regardless of Gentileschi’s background.
The same can be said of Bernard’s large canvases at MoAD. Bernard, a visual artist with an extensive acting career, has accused Bill Cosby of rape. Bernard’s background isn’t necessary to appreciate the scope of Carlota Leading the People (after Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830) and Bernard’s other paintings. They stand on their own as detailed windows into a kind of revisionist history that’s full of violence, turmoil, and the birth of resistance. Whether directly or indirectly, no one is immune to these three themes.
