Artist: Alexandra Bell
No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter, 2019– Photolithograph and screen print on paper
When I first saw this piece, I thought of the film that Ava DuVernay recently released, “When They See Us”. It was such an emotional piece that I was already in tears in the first episode. That same feeling translated into this piece. The atrocious writing against young, innocent Black men was so overbearing to witness. I felt angry at America, angry at our justice system, angry at the police. The blacked out writing and the highlighted words first grabbed my attention when I first witnessed the art. Then as I looked closely, I read the degrading language, creating a negative and scary image around these boys to not make them human anymore. The artwork is about these 5 innocent teenage boys of color that were wrongly charged of assaulting and r*ping a white female jogger in Central Park at night. Alexandra wanted to focus on how journalism can inadvertently encourage radicalized violence through language. The piece relates to N, NYPD from my abecedarian, because the justice system was rigged by the first people involved- the NYPD and the detectives involved. We see in the film by Ava DuVernay that the police coerced the boys into making untrue statements by making false promises to them that they would go home if they just lied. While it is the sole purpose of Police to protect the people, they continuously fail to uphold that standard, i.e The Central Park case which is presented in this work of art.
