New civil rights movement

ST. LOUIS — On Thursday evening, the crowd at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis overflowed the room in which Amy Sherald was speaking, so late arrivals watched the artist talk on monitors in the atrium. It’s been a little over three months since Sherald, the artist who painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, became a public figure, admired and reviled according to the usual cleavages of race and culture that divide this country. But for an artist who confesses a “healthy amount of self-doubt,” she is poised, confident and funny when addressing a crowd of people who deeply appreciate what she has done for painting, for women, for the Obamas, and for the cause of African American artists. “I thought I was going to die when I was 39,” the 44-year-old Sherald says. Her life story is part of the bond that ties her to the people in this room, many of whom already know the basic outlines: She was a struggling … [Read more...] about Painting Michelle Obama brought Amy Sherald fame. Now, the artist wants to make works ‘to rest your eyes.’

A sculpture by artist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo of enslaved people in chains at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) There are times when this city feels like the urban equivalent of a symphony by Charles Ives, a great, clashing, dissonant study in unresolved, competing hymns to the past. On one side of Dexter Avenue, a wide boulevard that connects the fountain at Court Square (once the site of the city’s principal slave market) to the capitol atop a low hill a few blocks away, is a stone memorial marker to the great civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. “I believe this march will go down as one of the greatest struggles for freedom and dignity in the nation’s history,” read the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., carved on white stone. On the other side of the street, nearby, is a similar but now weatherworn marker to Jefferson Davis, noting the street as the site of the Confederate … [Read more...] about Competing monuments in the cradle of the Confederacy and the Civil Rights movement

Corten steel monuments inscribed with the names of lynching victims and the dates they were killed hang from the roof structure at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a somber, hilltop pergola of rusted steel overlooking the city that saw the birth of both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement, is one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation. When it opens on Thursday, this ambitious project will force America to confront not only its wretched history of lynching and racial terror, but also an ongoing legacy of fear and trauma that stretches unbroken from the days of slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. As clearsighted, uncompromising and architecturally effective as any American design since Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the memorial sits in a mostly blighted neighborhood, … [Read more...] about A powerful memorial in Montgomery remembers the victims of lynching