Whitewalling

In 2017, the Whitney Biennial included a painting by a white artist, Dana Schutz, of the lynched body of a young black teenager, Emmett Till. In 1979, anger brewed over a show at New York's Artists Space titled *The Nigger Drawings*. In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition *Harlem on My Mind* did not include any paintings or sculptures by black artists. In all three cases, black artists and writers and their allies organized vigorous responses using the only forum available to them: public protest. *Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts* reflects on these incidents in the long and troubled history of art and race in postwar America. It lays bare how the art world - no less than the country at large - has persistently struggled with the politics of race, and the ways that this struggle has influenced how museums, curators, and artists wrestle with notions of free speech and the specter of censorship. *Whitewalling* takes a critical and intimate look at these three "acts" in the history of the American art scene and asks: When we speak of artistic freedom and the freedom of speech, who, exactly , is free to speak?