Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
MCBA Exhibition
A new art installation is on display at Minnesota Center for Book Arts in downtown Minneapolis. Pasted across the center’s windows are white posters with simple black text: White supremacy is tenacious. White supremacy is laughable. White supremacy is calculated. White supremacy is hot garbage. Eighteen phrases repeat across 140 prints. The art installation, titled Eyes Wide Shut, is the work of Evanston-based artist, designer, and letterpress printer Ben Blount.
“The first word I thought of was bullshit,” says Blount. He brainstormed, asked family and friends, and more came: Exhausting. Nurtured. Traumatic. Wack. Blount organized them into six “buckets” by theme—three words speak to white supremacy’s emotional toll, three to its absurdity, three to its constructed nature, etc. Eyes Wide Shut engages the many facets of white supremacy, and the tensions that exist between them. As Blount says in his artist’s statement: It’s ubiquitous, yet unseen. Both monumental and myth. Are we safe or are we surrounded?
In the last decade, there has been a vast increase in the use of the phrase “white supremacy” in the U.S.—as the New York Times put it, the term has “poured into the nation’s rhetorical bloodstream,” especially over the past year. And as the phrase’s use has expanded, so has its meaning: once largely reserved for figures like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, today “white supremacy” speaks to America’s racial reality as it exists in structures, institutions, histories, and systems. As Blount has written, across 231 square feet of prints: White supremacy is calculated. Intentional. Nurtured. He says he’s been trying to use the phrase more himself.
“I think it's more clear and direct. People have conversations about what is racism—can Black people be racist? Is racism only when it's intentional, you can't accidentally be racist? Is everyone racist? You can have nuance with the word racism, because everyone's not working from the same definition,” says Blount. “But if you say white supremacy, you're very clear what that means: that people believe that white people, because of skin color, basically are superior to others, and how that operates in the world.”
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
MCBA Exhibit
Eyes Wide Shut at Minnesota Center for Book Arts is outward-facing and hyper-visible, on display for anyone walking downtown or passing by in a car. But Blount’s first iteration of Eyes Wide Shut was installed inside a small room. He closed the door and covered the windows, leaving just a small slit to peek through: from a distance, viewers didn’t have to engage with the art at all. Peering through the glass, they could see it partially—and once inside, they were immersed, surrounded by art they had previously ignored.
“There's so much around race, and white supremacy, and identity in America that is unsaid. Because America is largely segregated, white people generally live around white people, and Black people generally live around Black people,” says Blount. “It depends on who you are, and where you grew up, on how you look at these things. Black people for years have been having conversations about racism and white supremacy, and how it affects our day to day lives. It's in our face all the time. And if you're white, if you grew up a certain way, you don't really have to engage with these things. You go through the world and see things through the eyes of your culture.”
Seeing the installation can be an emotional experience, Blount says, not just an intellectual exercise. Viewers might react with questions like what do they mean? why would he do this? and is it true? He hopes the prints inspire internal dialogue, and conversation.
That’s where Eyes Wide Shut’s work begins. “It's really a questioning of possibly someone's reality, if you're walking around the world, thinking … this is just the way things panned out, Black people are a certain way, white people a certain way, good luck, hard work, all these American aphorisms,” says Blount. “To say, no, there are a lot of intentional choices supported and created by large institutions, corporations, and the government, to have the country to be the way it is, that's pretty shocking.”
“We see this polarization, and how maddening it is for me to see how white supremacy is active in all facets, while someone else could say, ‘What are you talking about?’ and even challenge the idea of it. It's really interesting. Crazy making, almost,” says Blount. “That's just the beginning, having people have to confront this idea, and then getting down to the nuances of it. That’s almost the crux of the problem. We're talking about solutions for racism, and how we can come together, but if one side of the conversation doesn't even think it's a conversation worth having, that's hard to do.”
Eyes Wide Shut was installed at Minnesota Center for Book Arts just days after a mob that included white supremacists and far-right extremists attacked the U.S. Capitol, carrying out a violent insurrection as Congress attempted to certify the electoral college results of the 2020 presidential election. Blount says that it’s powerful to see his artwork come to life—and after such a visible, violent display of white supremacy, it has particular resonance.
“Maybe there's words on the posters that might resonate—something like white supremacy is traumatic,” says Blount. “Even if you're not necessarily on the side of it being a systemic, far-reaching phenomenon, the idea that's traumatic for some people seems pretty obvious now. You can see it operating in the world, even if you don't necessarily agree that it's calculated.”
MCBA Director of Exhibitions and Artist Programs Torey Erin says that so far, Eyes Wide Shut has received overwhelmingly positive reactions. When staff were installing the prints in the windows, many people honked and clapped, gave thumbs-ups, and pulled over to take videos. One stopped to give them the finger. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Erin says, MCBA has felt an urgency of justice—and prints, she notes, have played a historical role in protests, as a sort of “commons for the people.” But MCBA couldn’t have anticipated the installation going up at such a raw, traumatic moment.
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
MCBA Exhibit
“It's been really impactful, and unfortunately, very timely with the violent insurrection at the Capitol,” says Erin. Even so, Eyes Wide Shut’s message is evergreen. “After Joe Biden was elected, Ben and I had some discussion as to whether this loud of a message was necessary. We landed on yes, this isn't going away with a new president. The nation has been gaslighted in this way. It's a reality that this country is facing, and has been. It's deeply rooted in institutions. The first step is ownership, and accountability.”
Eyes Wide Shut will be on display at Minnesota Center for Book Arts through March 28. Blount also plans to print extra posters to sell via his website. For his part, he says his favorite print is a play on words: White supremacy is all the rage.
“I think it's really powerful, but it also makes me giggle a little bit,” says Blount. “All the rage as in it's really popular. But also, all the rage is that white supremacy is encompassing the rage and frustration of a people, because they feel like they're losing power that belongs to them.”
There’s a print near the center of Eyes Wide Shut that draws the eye in with a blank, asking us to answer: White supremacy is ________.
