For part of last spring and summer, artist Kara Walker's first large scale installation was on display at the former Domino Sugar Factory site in Williamsburg. From the Creative Time website: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby [was confected as] an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant".
Current events, with the demonstrations and riots in Baltimore over the murder of Freddie Gray, make this a germane first blog post. While contemporary acts of exploitation and aggression against this nation's black population may be more subtle than those not so subtly referenced in Walker's Subtlety, they are still highly troubling. From the subprime mortgages which were aggressively marketed to its minority populations and their subsequent foreclosures, to a shameful history of police violence, Baltimore's black population has been unfairly taken advantage of for a long time.
Baltimore's woes were brilliantly made spectacle once before in HBO's series The Wire just as Walker has made a stunning spectacle of the sugar industry's exploitations with her Marvelous Sugar Baby. While those familiar with the installation are likely picturing the massive sphinx with her grossly exaggerated and fetishized features drawing crowds of gawkers to pose for lewd selfies, what most struck me were her "babies": the molasses child laborers scattered around the installation space and very often overlooked in the radiance of their gleaming white sugar mama. Whether it is the spectacle of a riot or of a refulgent sphinx that draws our attention to matters of injustice and exploitation, it is still far too easy for us to overlook the little things that need our attention the most.