CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/3/2020

David Hammons in 'Soul of a Nation'

“I feel it is my moral obligation as a black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially,” David Hammons said in 1969, one year before he made this haunting double self-portrait. Titled “Black First, America Second” (1970), this body print and silkscreen on paper presents one version of the self that “clings to the stars of the national flag,” according to Soul of a Nation originating curators Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, “while the other self appears almost painfully cleaved by its stripes… [It] is an image both timely and resolutely of its time.” This work and 235 others are featured in Soul of a Nation, the exhibition catalog of the decade and a timely reminder of the power of art in an age of Black Power.