“Untitled (BLCK–We wear the mask)” is part of a series of multimedia works that Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier created in 2007-2008 in the guise of “BLCK”—a fictitious collaborative comprised of artists of color ostensibly based in Miami in the late 1960s.
Guerrier imagines the group’s members living and working amid the warehouses and apartment complexes of Liberty City, a predominantly African American neighborhood that appears in a set of monochromatic photographs that hang on the wall. A monitor on the floor plays vintage video footage, establishing the tumultuous 1960s as the context. Against the wall are black-on-black wood protest signs and collaged prints inscribed with powerful yet hard to read messages jumbled with abstract imagery.
Combining the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the artist’s own meditations, the signs and the accompanying prints evoke artifacts from an era that brimmed with public demand for radical change, reminiscent of our own moment. #ShareBlackStories
Adler Guerrier. “Untitled (BLCK-We wear the mask),” 2007–08. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase. © Adler Guerrier
PAMM
Installation view from Adler Guerrier : Formulating a Plot, Pérez Art Museum Miami, August 7, 2014 – January 25, 2015. Photo: Courtesy of Miami Fine Art Studio LHOOQ.
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties,Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
Paul Laurence Dunbar
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile,
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
