Reflections on Black Visual Artist Doug Redd

Abstract

This essay was inspired by the death and devastation related to the pandemic of Covid-19 which intensified the ways that preexisting sociopolitical contradictions affected black people. Before the pandemic it was commonplace for thinkers to describe themselves as radicals. However, in the moment of crisis, their voices were often silent or they offered superficial commentaries. And the magnitude of their limitations—conflating moral protestations with political analyses, for instance—evoked memories of perceptive thinkers that I knew as a young man, such as visual artist Doug Redd whose worldview and aesthetics exemplify our need for alternative sensibilities, perspectives, and centers of thought in African American culture.