Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law

I first began to develop the ideas in this essay when I delivered the Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values at Southern Utah University in 2018. The lecture evolved into a version of this essay given as the 19th Annual Navin Narayan Memorial Lecture in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University on November 19, 2019. The late Navin Narayan’s selflessness and dedication to social justice offered the inspiration for the development of this project. I’m deeply grateful for both lecture invitations, from Danielle Dubrasky and Anya Bassett, respectively, for the encouragement of the Narayan family, and for engagement with drafts of this text by many colleagues, including Courtney Baker, Timothy Barringer, Suzanne Blier, Adrienne Brown, Huey Copeland, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maria Gough, Jeffrey Hamburger, Joan Kee, Robin Kelsey, Jinah Kim, Joseph Koerner, Ewa Lajer- Burcharth, Caroline Light, Jordana Moore Saggese, Tommie Shelby, Deborah Willis, Harvard graduate students Jessica Williams and Rachel Burke, and the anonymous reviewers of this article.

The epigraphs are from Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Ground,” trans. Keith Hoeller, Man and World 7 (1974): 207, emphasis in original; and Jericho Brown, “Shovel,” The Tradition (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019), 37.

1 Diamond Reynolds, as quoted by Mark Bradford in Jennifer King, “Now on View: Mark Bradford’s ‘150 Portrait Tone,’” Unframed, October 17, 2017, https://unframed.lacma.org/2017/10/19/now-view-mark-bradford%E2%80%99s-150-portrait-tone.

2 See Bedford, “Against Abstraction,” in Mark Bradford, ed. Bedford, exh. cat. (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 7–29; Katy Siegel, “Somebody and Nobody,” in ibid., 103–19.

3 See Michel S. Laguerre, The Informal City (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Steven Nelson, “Mark Bradford's Allegorical Impulse,” in Mark Bradford, exh. cat. (New York: Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 2006), 9–13; and Huey Copeland, “A Range of Convergences,” Parkett 89 (2011): 152–59.

4 For Bradford’s discussion of paper as a form of “frozen pigment,” see Huey Copeland, “Painting after All: A Conversation with Mark Bradford,” Callaloo 37, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 824.

5 Bradford quoted in Lanre Bakare, “Mark Bradford: The Artist and Ex-hairdresser Forcing America to Face Ugly Truths about Itself,” Guardian, November 17, 2017.

6 Copeland, “Painting after All,” 814.

7 This term “groundwork” is not in conscious dialogue with Karl Marx’s term Grundrisse, used in an early elaboration of Communist history and a commentary on the connection between property and personal interactions and freedom, as discussed in his unfinished manuscript “Grundrisse der Kritik de politischen Ökonomie” (Fundamentals of political economy criticism). See Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973).

8 Caroline Light, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 8, 155. Light’s scholarship on SYG law has been of enormous value as I developed this project.

9 Ibid., 12.

10 See Cato v. United States. I’d like to thank Joan Kee for her generous feedback on an early draft of this article that prompted my decision to focus squarely on the concept of the “ground” and for her scholarship in Kee, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), along with Joseph Koerner for his sustained, thoughtful engagement with various iterations of my development of the theory of groundwork.

11 See Mia Fischer and K. Mohrman, “Black Deaths Matter? Sousveillance and the Invisibility of Black Life,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 10 (2016), https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-fischer-mohrman/. Ariella Azoulay anticipated the shift from the sovereignty of the photographer to the agency of the subject in creating images that impact civic life, in Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Courtney Baker, Elizabeth Alexander, and Karla F. C. Holloway are among the many scholars who have incisively analyzed the ethical dimensions of looking in the context of violence against Black bodies in the United States. See Baker, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Alexander, “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This? Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 91; and Holloway, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories; A Memorial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

12 Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015). See also Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

13 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 58.

14 While a fuller engagement with Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of Vincent van Gogh via his essay “On the Origins of a Work of Art” is not within the scope of this article, it is important to highlight that the idea of the ground or Boden in the Heideggerian tradition is connected to a rootedness and territorialism in ways that diverge from its connotation in this contemporary context. See Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne Simmel (New York: Springer Publishing, 1968), 203–9; Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen, Germany: Neske, 1957), 191–211; and Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Ground,” trans. Keith Hoeller, Man and World 7 (1974): 207–22.

15 Michael Allen Gillespie, “The Question of History,” in Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 24.

16 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13; Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6, 45, 73, 107, 133. This article’s meditation on the term “precarity” and ideas of futurity is, too, in dialogue with Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

17 T. J. Clark, “Painting at Ground Level,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton University, April 17–19, 2002 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004), 135.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 134–35, 152.

20 Here I am thinking of the expanded notion of sovereignty as found at the intersection of and also the distinctions between Black and Indigenous studies focusing on environmental mutuality. See Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

21 Bradford, having studied the practice of décollage in post–World War II era Paris, considers Jacques de la Villege, Raymond Hains, and Mimmo Rotella among his influences. Bradford, in-person interview with the author, December 22, 2005. See also Sarah Lewis, “Mark Bradford: The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” in Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova, and Robin Rhode, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker, exh. cat. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

22 Bradford quoted in Smithsonian Institution press release, March 20, 2017, https://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/mark-bradford-picketts-charge/.

23 Tobias Wofford, “Mark Bradford: Pickett’s Charge,” Panorama 4, no. 2 (2018).

24 Bradford quoted in Christopher Bedford and Mark Bradford, “Loose Like a Shawl: Christopher Bedford and Mark Bradford,” in Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day, ed. Katy Siegel and Bedford, exh. cat. (New York: Gregory R. Miller; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2017), 123.

25 Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3, 21.

26 Burns aptly notes that Quidor takes the gothic tones of Irving’s tale to extremes not found in the text through this focus on aligning blackness with terror. For more on Quidor, see ibid., 101–2, 105–6, 108–9, 125.

27 Bradford quoted in Jori Finkel, “An Artist’s Mythic Rebellion for the Venice Biennale,” New York Times, April 27, 2017.

28 See Zadie Smith, “Niagara,” in Siegel and Bedford, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 82–93.

29 Bradford quoted in “Anita Hill in Conversation with Mark Bradford,” in Anita Hill, Sebastian Smee, and Connie Butler, Mark Bradford (London: Phaidon Press, 2018), 32.

30 Bradford, telephone interview with the author, July 2020.

31 See Lorna Roth, “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 34, no. 1 (2009): 116. See also Lorna Roth, “The Delicate Acts of ‘Colour Balancing’: Multiculturalism and Canadian Television Broadcasting Policies and Practices,” Canadian Journal of Communication 23, no. 4 (April 1988): 487–506. I engage this scholarship in Sarah Lewis, “The Racial Bias Built into Photography,” New York Times, April 25, 2019.

32 See Nicole R. Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 8–10; Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Kathleen Stewart Howe, First Seen: Portraits of the World’s Peoples, 1840– 1880, exh. cat. (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2004); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth- Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

33 Bradford cited in “Loose Like a Shawl,” in Siegel and Bedford, Mark Bradford: Tomorrow Is Another Day, 113.

34 Bradford quoted in Alina Cohen, “AIDS, Abstraction, and Absent Bodies: A Conversation with Mark Bradford,” Hyperallergic, December 9, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/260045/aids-abstraction-and-absent-bodies-a-conversation-with-mark-bradford/.

35 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Agnes Martin: The/Cloud/,” in Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 78. I follow Barry Schwabsky’s assessment that contemporary landscape painting, flourishing and undergoing reinvention, however overlooked due to the conditioning and dominance of abstraction, often contains allusions to nature as decried by Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. Schwabsky, “Painting with the Flow of the World,” in Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, ed. Todd Bradway (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 13–15.

36 Copeland, “Painting after All,” 819. For the history of Brockman Gallery and Brockman Productions in Leimert Park, see Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 145–51. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I was invited to become a board member of the Art + Practice Foundation only after I submitted this article for publication.

37 See Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91.

38 Fleetwood, On Racial Icons, 8–10.

39 See Adrienne R. Brown, The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 28, 29.

40 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84, 86, 90.

41 See Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscano, and Kalia Brooks Nelson, eds., Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019); and Tanya Sheehan, Photography and Migration (New York: Routledge, 2018).

42 Jericho Brown, “Shovel,” The Tradition (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019), 37.

43 Clark, “Painting at Ground Level,” 135.

44 See Brown, Black Skyscraper, 2, 127–28. See also Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

45 Brown, Black Skyscraper, 2.

46 For more on Amy Sherald’s use of grisaille, see Richard J. Powell, “The Obama Portraits, in Art History and Beyond,” in The Obama Portraits, ed. Tania Caragol, Dorothy Moss, and Powell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 55, 93; and Erin Christovale, “Notes on Amy Sherald,” in Amy Sherald, ed. Lisa Melandri, exh. cat. (Saint Louis: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2018), 15.

47 See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

48 See Sherrilyn Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty- First Century, foreword by Bryan Stevenson (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).

49 See the Equal Justice Initiative publication Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, downloadable at https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/lynching-in-america-3d-ed-080219.pdf, as of August 2, 2020.

50 Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

51 Wiley, in-person interview with the author, November 2019.

52 Ibid.

53 John R. Stilgoe, What Is Landscape? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 89. While there is not space to do so here, I engage fully with the historiography of landscape in the history of art as distinct from groundwork in the book- length version of this project.

54 Bradford quoted in Hill, Smee, and Butler, Mark Bradford, 36.

55 Ibid.

56 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

57 Ibid., 2–11, 18, 25, 32, 51, 58, 126, 154, 158, 230, 241, 257, 263.

58 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 8 (emphasis added).

59 Kee, Models of Integrity, 235.

60 Ibid., 5.

61 Ibid., 236.

62 See Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Dianne D. Glave, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010); Paul Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Dorceta E. Taylor, “Blacks and the Environment: Toward an Explanation of the Concern and Action Gap between Blacks and Whites,” Environment and Behavior 21, no. 2 (1989): 175–205; and Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

63 Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).

64 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 20.