Justice Delayed: “Make America What America Must Become” at the CAC New Orleans

“Such a robust showing of regional artists is unusual, even in Louisiana. The exhibition seeks to present a picture of urgent contemporary art concerns, and to reflect what many institutions are doing in response to the nation’s current political climate. Numerous venues now house works that directly question the society from which such art institutions derive their power to set the critical discourse. The show finds its guiding spirit in Baldwin’s letter upon the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in which he imparts the tough wisdom he amassed through struggle at home, and in expatriation and return. America is both his and his nephew’s only true home, he says, and so its fate is their own. The only hope for freedom lies in refuting a mythology based on lack of awareness and accountability: “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.”