Whitfield Lovell’s charcoal on tabletop 1999 piece, “Mercy,” echoes Walker’s inherent clarity, finding a ghost in the moment of supper being served.  Lovell’s skill at representation allows his charcoal drawing to disappear somehow while appearing – there’s an ache inside the piece, his drawing of the woman transcending what a drawing is supposed to be as it is located within a scene Lovell provides.  Old spoons and bowls frame the drawing, and the table-top in which Lovell drew in charcoal is scarred and stylized, like a prop that somehow becomes functional.

Hank Willis Thomas contributes a 2009 lithograph, “Untitled” featuring a slave-selling ad from a 1672 Charleston newspaper, replacing the original slave imagery with silhouettes of Michael Jackson and Michael Jordon.  Almost a one-note joke, Thomas extends the humor beyond sententiousness by giving the document an Andy-Warhol precision, the lithograph transforming what was once an evil, banal document of kidnapping, ownership and murder into a mean-spirited and righteous romp.

Lorna Simpson’s 1996 “Untitled,” a color digital photography and felt, is a Max-Ernst meditation on Victoriana and slavery, finding romantic cynicism in the juxtaposition of two lady suicides and two slaves being murdered.  You can feel anger solidifying into outrage in this piece, cooled by a sense of exactitude.  Simpson seems to be seeking a way out of sentimentality by focusing on its inherent need to simplify and decorate emotion and events so they become greeting-card moments we can digest without thinking.  By pulling these two moments together, we see how death can become as meaningless as anything else, but Simpson’s juxtaposition also allows us to make a choice to locate double meaning in her purpose.  Simpson’s intentionality, like all of the works in the “Memory and History” section of “African American Art since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center,” burns away naïve notions of history and contrition.