Has the myth been shattered

The exhibition opens with Rosales's eponymous work, which incorporates a Los Angeles Times front page published in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, encased in a frame with LED lights and a two-way mirror. Beneath the lights' changing colors, the headlines "Seeing Ourselves" and "Has the Myth Been Shattered?" glow, transforming a historical record into a site of reflection. The question the newspaper posed more than three decades ago has not been resolved; Rosales literally holds a mirror to it, making space for our collective examination.

Many works on view were made in the 1980s and 1990s, with artists often responding to the print media materials of their moment and to the stories those images told about race, history, and belonging. Others, made more recently, combine historical and contemporary materials to shed light on continuing societal struggles. A throughline of the exhibition, and an enduring thread in the collection, is an emphasis on artists who address the social and political issues of their time. Placing works in proximity, the show creates juxtapositions that illuminate how the beliefs and stories a society lives by are constructed, inherited, and contested over time.

Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot (2018) by Hank Willis Thomas recreates a historic 13-page pamphlet produced in 1968 for Black residents in Delaware during the National Guard’s nine-month occupation of Wilmington. Printed on retroreflective vinyl, instructive texts on how to provide first aid and navigate police interactions are overlaid with images of the occupation itself, revealed when exposed to flash. Mickalene Thomas’s The Charnel House (Resist #5) (2021) deploys a different but equally pointed strategy, referencing Picasso’s unfinished wartime painting The Charnel House (1944–45) and filling her canvas with overlapping archival images and signage associated with the Civil Rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. By interweaving demands for racial justice and art historical dialogue, the work transforms grief into a call for action, carrying the momentum of resistance forward.