Portfolio of Artworks

The following Portfolio section comprises a selection of contemporary artworks examining the materials and metaphors of guns. The selection is intergenerational in scope and spans a multiplicity of mediums including video, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and drawing. In order to give context to each work and articulate its core stakes and questions, each artwork is accompanied by a brief explanatory text written by the artist or by an author deeply invested in that artist’s practice.

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Figure 1.

Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964. Oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 34 1/2” (62.2 x 87.6 cm). Gift of Edward R. Broida in honor of John Elderfield.

In this early oil painting by Vija Celmins, a bare right arm extends across an empty ochre ground, index finger on the trigger of a revolver. From the cloud of white smoke we gather a shot has just been fired, but at what or who we cannot know, nor why. Throughout 1964, Celmins had been making still lifes of the individual objects that populated her Los Angeles studio, focusing on appliances like her hot plate, fan, and lamp. The gun belonged to this studio inventory, left by a friend who had received it from her boyfriend following an attack. Yet unlike Celmins’s other subjects, which could be pictured alone, even when switched ‘on’, a gun required the presence of a body – or at least a hand – to make it work. Likewise, while her other subjects could be observed by the naked eye, a gunshot could not. The conditions of the gun-as-object thus required a change in artistic method. Instead of painting from life, Celmins relied on source photographs, first documenting a friend holding the gun aloft, and then looking to gun magazines for images of the explosion itself. In the following year, Celmins began to make paintings based meticulously on photographs, a practice that has come to define her oeuvre.

Gun with Hand #1 captures the tension between stasis and action, observation and invention, painting and photograph that its creation entailed; the artist recently characterized the artwork as ‘like a little theater’ (see Celmins, 2010). It also occupies uncertain terrain with respect to conventions of genre. While a steaming pan or a glowing hot plate belongs to the quotidian realm of still life, a just-fired gun is an event belonging to the tradition of history painting. Yet here the dramatic subject is unmoored from any particular context – no shooter, victim, date, or cause. As still life, the smoking gun is free to conjure a myriad of memories and associations. In 1964, it might recall the assassination of John F Kennedy. In hindsight, it seems to foreshadow the tumult – the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement – that would come to define the decade.

Frances Jacobus-Parker

Frances Jacobus-Parker is an art historian and curator whose research focuses on Modern and Contemporary Art. She is a PhD candidate in Art History at Princeton University and is completing a dissertation on the work of the artist Vija Celmins.

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Figure 2.

Fred Hampton’s Door II, 1974. Dana C Chandler, Jr. Acrylic on door, 85.875 x 48 x 24.25 in.

Dana Chandler, Jr.’s Fred Hampton’s Door II (1974) starkly opposes the ‘official’ accounts of the supposed illegal weapons raid during which Black Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton were killed by police gunfire on 4 December 1969. A found object sculpture at which the artist fired actual bullets, Door II refutes the widely circulated reports that the men’s violent deaths were the unintended result of a Panther-initiated shoot-out. Emblazoned with the colors of the black liberation flag, the artwork reimagines the raid’s most contested physical evidence – the front door of Hampton’s Near West Side, Chicago, apartment – from a decidedly counter-state perspective. Whereas the involved officers claimed to have employed deadly force only in self-defense (pointing to a bullet hole in the front door as apparent proof of the occupants’ instigation of the gun battle), the Panthers insisted that the onslaught had begun when the tactical squad shot Clark from the entryway as he approached the closed front door.

Instead of reproducing the exact details of the raid’s aftermath, Chandler’s 7-foot sculpture metonymically testifies to the murderous ‘shoot-in’, as the Panthers characterized the bloodshed, which proceeded from room to room, though the majority of the bullets were directed toward Hampton’s bedroom. Featuring a ‘U.S. approved’ seal and a placard identifying Hampton as a known leader in the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Door II portrays the 21-year-old Deputy Chairman as the target of an assassination plot, not a chance victim. Positioning audiences at the threshold of the crime scene, the artwork stands in defiance of whitewashed representations of state-sanctioned violence that otherwise color public perception of such incidents. Chandler’s brutally assisted readymade – a real door shot with real bullets – expands on the logics of his Fred Hampton’s Door (1970), a trompe l’oeil acrylic painting that was reportedly stolen in the early 1970s.

Erin Reitz

Erin Reitz is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Pembroke Center. She researches and teaches at the intersection of contemporary art and politics, with an emphasis on American and African Diasporic art and visual culture.

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Figure 3.

Corey Pickett, Phantom 5000, 2017. Wood, foam, fabric, 35 x 28 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Corey Pickett makes guns that combat mainstream expectations. He creates large, colorful, upholstered sculptures of handguns as ‘an appeal for common sense gun laws and the re-evaluation of current gun legislation’ (see Corey Pickett, 2018). He constructs a wooden armature (often incorporating movable parts, for example, the gun barrel) which he then pads and covers by hand with a combination of mass-produced printed fabrics that mimic African and Victorian textiles. For exhibitions, Pickett sometimes hangs his sculptures directly on the gallery wall, referencing a mode of display characteristic of gun retailers and trade shows. Audiences’ varied responses – such as attraction, disdain, and uncertainty – reflect the heated, polarizing state of gun debates in American society, and their intersection with issues of race, neocolonialism, craft, and public space. Notions of privilege, value, ownership, distribution, desirability and more are unavoidable when encountering these artworks.

Pickett’s experiences – as a child in Georgia, then as an adult enrolled in the US military, and now as an artist and community leader – have informed his belief that artworks can be mediums of activism. He has said that, as a black man, he has a level of fear predicated on the current state of America and our gun laws (see Central Features Contemporary Art, 2017). Recently he has focused on creating more ray gun sculptures, borrowing from Afrofuturism to exemplify, and arguably embody, the power of art to challenge the status quo.

Nancy Zastudil

Nancy Zastudil is an art curator, writer, editor, and administrator dedicated to making positive change through philanthropy and entrepreneurship in the arts.

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Figure 4.

Adrian Piper, Imagine [Trayvon Martin], 2013.

I created this work to memorialize the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American boy, as he was walking home from a convenience store. A Euroethnic vigilante neighbor, George Zimmerman, followed him against police orders and fatally shot him in the chest. Local police declined to charge Zimmerman with any crime. In 2013, a local jury acquitted him of second-degree murder and manslaughter.

Trayvon Martin was not the first or only victim of police state-sponsored violence against unarmed African Americans. Several more recent cases have received the attention of the international press. Others, both before and since, have gone unnoticed or have been forgotten. But Trayvon Martin’s shooting death was the wake-up call for many of those Euroethnic Americans for whom Barack Obama’s presidency was supposedly conclusive proof that American racism was a thing of the past.

As an antidote to further memory loss, I have been distributing this work free of charge and as widely as possible. It is available for free download as a high-resolution PNG file at http://adrianpiper.com/art/index.shtml, and can be printed out in a variety of sizes and formats. Please take one, or many, and pass it on.

Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper is a first-generation Conceptual artist who lives and works in Berlin where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969, received a BA in Philosophy from CCNY in 1974, and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1981 under the supervision of John Rawls. Piper was the first tenured African American woman Professor in the field of Philosophy, and introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art and explicit political content into Minimalism. Her seventh traveling retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in Spring 2018, and her artwork won the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennial.

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Figure 5.

Cara Levine, This Is Not A Gun series, 2016-ongoing. Wood, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

In 2016, Cara Levine began documenting a series of ubiquitous objects mistaken as guns by police officers in shootings of unarmed, majority black, civilians. In her studio Levine meticulously carves each object from wood as an elongated act of prayer, respect, and remembrance for the lives lost. As an addendum to the wood-carvings, Levine teams up with organizations, artists, activists, and mindfulness collaborators ¹ across the country to host public workshops, during which each participant may carve the shape of these not-gun objects in clay.

Object empathy presumes that the same acute sensitivity typically understood as transpiring exclusively between two animate beings may be applied toward objects, such that no form is so unyielding that we may not project life into it. ² To meditate on a single object, to elongate its meaning and stretch our understanding of its shape, creates a psychic space which may be filled with empathic tenderness. Participants in the workshops feel their way into the crises associated with each not-gun object, and, similar to Levine’s exacting practice of carving, a careful tenderness proliferates. It is the moment of contact between a maker’s hand and a cold slab of clay, becoming warmer, where the heart of this work lies. Process takes over, a desire to meticulously craft the nooks and curves of these objects, to become the hand that held them. Makers volley between mindless focus and mindful heartbreak. The ordinary objects, instrumentalized by the police as alibi, come in and out of view as weapons themselves, mobilized against subjects of color whose bodies are more readily marked for violence in a society that privileges whiteness as the marker of innocence. Levine’s carvings and the methods proposed in each workshop demonstrate a way of being with ourselves and each other, as witnesses and survivors of racial bias and gun violence.