American Artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition, My Blue Window, opening at the Queens Museum on October 6, is previewed in the print issue of September’s Artforum.
“Blackness and blueness are intimately entwined in America. There are so many blue screens of death. The tension between the two, between black visibility and the violence of surveillance, forms the foundation of American Artist’s practice. The artist’s change to their legal name, meanwhile, grants them anonymity even as it works to overwrite art history, to make the default American artist black. Technology, like humans, inherits all the prejudices of its precursors. American Artist’s second institutional solo show will extend their consideration of systemic bias to the algorithmic racism hard-coded into artificial-intelligence tools. A new multimedia installation will marry video, bleachers, a curtain, and a downloadable phone app to focus on predictive policing technologies that dispatch cops before any crimes occur. What could possibly go wrong?” –Rahel Aima
