In conjunction with this event, the Cooper Gallery will be open until 8:30pm
Featuring the art of Jules Arthur, Michelle Browder, Michelle Hartney, Jeremy Daniel, Vinnie Bagwell, King Cobra, Anyika McMillan-Herod, Malcolm Herod, Charly Evon Simpson, Tsedaye Makonnen, Sarah Krulwich, Howard Simmons and Spencer PlattCo-sponsored with the Resilient Sisterhood Project and curated by Dell Marie Hamilton
In 2019, the Resilient Sisterhood Project, (RSP), a non-profit healthcare advocacy organization that supports Black communities, took a leading role in illuminating and raising public awareness about the notorious medical experiments of Dr. James Marion Sims, and the surgeries he conducted on enslaved Black women in the mid-19th century. Guided by the Sankofa principle of looking to the past to understand the present, RSP commissioned artist Jules Arthur to create a suite of paintings to center the identities of three of the women Sims named in his writings. They were known as Lucy, Betsey and Anarcha.
In an effort to extend the conversation, this exhibition includes Arthur’s paintings as well as the work of Vinnie Bagwell, Michelle Browder, Jeremy Daniel, Michelle Hartney, King Cobra (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Sara Krulwich, Anyika McMillan-Herod, Malcolm Herod, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Charly Evon Simpson. These artists have sought to reclaim the memory of these courageous women with humanity and compassion. The photographs of Howard Simmons and Spencer Platt have documented the work of steadfast organizers who lobbied and pushed the City of New York to remove Sims’s monument at the corner of Central Park and East 103rd Street in 2018.
Whether it’s the astronomical rates of Black maternal mortality, sterilization efforts that targeted Mexican and Puerto Rican women in the 20th century, or the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the push to block gender-affirming care for trans youth, this collaboration between RSP and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, asks audiences to reflect on how the roots of this history and its attending racial, gender, ethnic and class biases are baked into the woeful state of contemporary healthcare practice.