Roxane Gay: My name is Roxane Gay, and I’m a writer.
Paul Kobrak: Can you tell us what you’ve chosen from the MoMA collection?
Roxane: Yes, I chose Christ’s entry into journalism by Kara Walker.
She has managed, in a series of figures, to depict the whole of African American history
on one canvas, and that’s a pretty incredible thing to do.
We see bodies always in motion, bodies oftentimes being subjected to the whims of others.
And so, it’s quite a portrait, and what’s really interesting is that there’s all this white space,
so that you’re really forced to take each image in isolation before you can take them as a whole.
A piece like this demands that you linger, because you want to take it all in, and you
want to see some of the nuance and the details that emerge.
Yasmil Raymond: It asks for a bench.
Roxane Gay: It does.
Yasmil: What I’ve always appreciated about Kara’s work is that she lures you in with one image
and then tries to hold your hand.
I always feel like she wants to hold my hand and say “it’s okay, we’re going to now
go through some difficult thruths, but stay here,
because the longer you stay, the better you will understand what I’m after."
Paul: How does it make you feel?
Roxane: Overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed because of the scope, and also,
many of the images are difficult.
They’re painful, and they’re supposed to be.
And I think that it’s important that you don’t look away,
that you sit in that discomfort.
There’s a lot of, I think, productive work that happens in these uncomfortable spaces,
where we’re forced to confront history.
There’s a woman who’s bare chested, and there’s a smile on her face and she’s shrugging.
She’s insouciant, really.
And that’s an incredible detail.
That even amidst so much pain, she still manages, the artist, to capture joy.
And I think that’s an important thing when you’re telling the story of black history.
That as much as there has been suffering, there has also been joy.
Art doesn’t ask you to just react, it asks you to move towards something different,
and that’s important.
So, I think I feel more motivated to continue doing the work that I do,
than to just, sort of, sit in anger.
It’s always great to see something of your life and your ideology reflected back to you,
especially as women of color, we don’t get to see that a lot.
Kara always prioritizes black bodies, and that there’s an absurdity to
some of the things that black people have been subjected to,
and that she is playing with that absurdity.
It challenges me.
It’s like, how can you have that a few feet away from a hanging black body.
And yet, it’s there, and I like that challenge.
And I like that she’s willing to do that in her work.
And I think there are multiple narratives, but the whole narrative is just the sort of
push and pull toward and away from freedom.
And you can see that in a lot of the choices that she’s made
in terms of the figures that she represents across the canvas.
It’s not a piece that wants to be contained.
And I don’t think its meaning can be contained either.
I think that’s what all artists and certainly that’s what I try to do as a writer.
Like, if you can summarize what I’ve done in one neat and tidy sentence, then I have failed.
And you can’t summarize this in one line.
Thank God.