Notes from MoAD: Episode 8 with DeShawn Dumas and Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen

Art Practical Audio

For episode 8 of the Notes from MoAD series, visual artist DeShawn Dumas and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss the fragility and resilience of glass, the terrifying and meditative properties of art and shooting guns, and the qualities and limits of the art institution as community space. In conversation about the creation of his works, Dumas describes how the “performance” of creating the works embodied the navigation required to survive in this landscape. By creating abstract works, the artist shifts from the narrative of race in America to the visceral experiences of those most affected by the oppressive systems and violent tools of Colonialism. DeShawn Dumas’s solo exhibition, "Against the End of History," presented painting, video, and the artist’s self-described ballistic monochromes in a multimedia installation that situates the sacred within the political. Dumas counters the assertion of liberal democracy as the final form of human government and defender of human dignity as established by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay “The End of History?”. Dumas deploys the visual languages of abstraction and minimalism to explore the psychic and historical afterlives of slavery, the increasing cultural predominance of militarized policing and the ecological catastrophe of climate change. Inhabiting the terrors of a past, not yet past, "Against the End of History" offered a space to contemplate the struggle for future(s) worth living. "DeShawn Dumas: Against the End of History" was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco as part of the Emerging Artists Program September 4 through November 15, 2019.