‘Are Your Lungs Worth More?’ An Artist Captures the Protests in New York

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On May 30, Kevin Claiborne, a 31-year-old artist enrolled in Columbia University’s visual arts MFA program, was on a Manhattan sidewalk photographing his fellow marchers when a police officer approached him with a baton. “He swung at my face, knees, and camera, even though I’d put my hands up,” Claiborne says. “And then ran away back into the crowd of police.” After he was beaten, Claiborne says, he was maced. (The New York Police Department did not supply comment when asked about this incident.) The experience, he notes, “was a prime example for why these things need to be documented and shared.”

Claiborne was born on Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland—both of his parents were in the service—and his background is in math and education. He entered Columbia with a concentration in photography, “but I consider myself a conceptual artist,” he says.

His 2019 project Untitled (A Void: Me), for instance, is a series of black-and-white self-portraits depicting his own death on the street, calling to mind police brutality, depression, and abandonment. “It’s about how living in a racialized system affects stress, anxiety, depression,” he says. “I’m using personal experience to inform the work.”

Claiborne began to join demonstrations as soon as videos of George Floyd’s killing were made public. “I bring my signs to the protests, but I also bring my camera,” he says.

The art here is part of Black Rainbow (working title), a series using Polaroids that he began taking during the first two weeks of the protests. “I was looking for the environment and periphery of these locations of violence and uprising,” he says. “When you’re in the middle of an uprising, what do you see when you look up? When you look out, when you look around?”

As the Polaroids developed, Claiborne modified them with his fingers, imprinting his physical presence on the scenes of unrest. He then overlaid the images with questions he wrote in his diary after each day’s protest. (Each image’s title is its overlaid text.)

For the above work for Bloomberg Businessweek, Claiborne has mounted the six pieces on a free-form poem he wrote. “It’s a direct response to some of the violence that’s been going on against black communities in our country,” he says. “It’s violence against black bodies, trans bodies, and the queer community as well.”