CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/7/2021

Looking to David Hammons, as we search the soul of our 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—a crucial reference at a moment when both the presidential and senatorial elections have literally been decided by Black voters, even as white supremacist insurgents were allowed yesterday to storm the Capital as part of President Trump's historically shameful last act.