Image credit: BUREAU of CHANGE: Amazing Grace (ft. Barack Obama), 2016. Video installation.

Rebecca Lee Reynolds describes BUREAU’s “Amazing Grace” in relation to U.S. history and 2016’s whirling images of tragedy, scandal, political maneuverings, and reimaginations of iconic symbols of civil and human conflict:

“This past year has provided plenty of material: Alton Sterling and the cops killed in Baton Rouge, the Confederate Monuments being voted for removal, the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the approaching end of Obama’s presidency, Hillary vs. Bernie, the rise of Trump.”

Inside the small gallery by the elevators, I was drawn to Amazing Grace (ft. Barack Obama) (2016), a video work curated and directed by Margot Herster for the collective “Bureau of Change,” a kind of think tank dedicated to using art to create institutional change. The video features an African-American man wearing a Statue of Liberty costume—the character, played by Jason Brye, is a walking advertisement for Liberty Tax Service. The pale green robe is simply thrown over his jeans and sneakers when we meet him on a random New Orleans street, walking towards the camera and presumably to his job, holding the tax placards loosely in his hand. We watch this black Statue of Liberty doing his work on St. Claude Avenue at the base of the bridge to the Lower Ninth Ward, and then we follow him as he walks past the Jefferson Davis monument—a subtitle refers to the City Council’s vote to remove Confederate monuments from the city, listing this one as “scheduled for removal, date TBD.”

The walking tour is interspersed with footage of other Confederate monuments in town and protests, beginning with a Jan. 2016 protest at Lee Circle and ending with a July 2016 Black Lives Matter protest at Lee Circle after the Alton Sterling video was released. In between we see images sourced from public records: a still photo of Walter Scott in North Charleston, video of Tamir Rice, a historical photograph of the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, cropped photographs of the eyes of each victim of the Emanuel AME massacre. The graininess and poor quality of these last photographs is distracting, but it refers to their source in public records and the collective’s commitment to using public sources to expose problems. The intentional strategy includes the title’s reference to President Obama singing “Amazing Grace” during the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the victims of the Emanuel AME shootings in Charleston. Another performance of the song serves as a soundtrack to Brye’s walk through this landscape of racial violence.

As the video concludes, the screen goes black and transitions to Brye posed against a white background. Holding the plastic torch out in front of him like the actual Statue of Liberty, he slowly turns, as if shedding the light of liberty on his audience. There’s a sad irony to Brye’s character, performing the icon of liberty while we watch protests against the reality of a lack of equality. The hopefulness of the statue falls apart in face of this fake version, played as an advertisement, devoid of actual liberty or equality. And Brye’s eyes seem vacant as well, his body going through the motions. There’s an emptiness to the statues too, often ignored until protests this past year reinvested them with new emotion. The audio counters all of this coldness. The rap narration by K.G. fills in the blanks by expressing the lack of equality, while a beautiful rendition of “Amazing Grace” (credited to K.G.’s mom) counters that anger and frustration with a promise of redemption.

 

Download Article: Louisiana Art 2016 by Rebecca Lee Reynolds in New Orleans Art Review, Winter 2017