Forget It

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Forget It

Artist Adrian Piper (American, born 1948)

Date1991

Dimensions10 3/4 x 21 1/4 in.

MediumOffset lithograph

ClassificationPrints

Credit LineGift of Barbara Sunderman Hoerner

Object number

2010.60

Not on View

Label TextConfrontation is a key theme that runs throughout Adrian Piper’s five decades of activist art advocating social and political change. In Forget It Piper combines a news photograph of the white defendants from Queens, New York indicted for the 1986 racially motivated murder of Michael Griffith with her drawing of the three proverbial monkeys who ignore evil. At center is a drawing of a nude, erect Black man behind the boxes of a blank credit application. At right is another press photograph of an emaciated Somalian mother and child. Printed in red at left and right are the words “Forget it,” which ironically demand the viewer to ignore the forceful images of systemic discrimination, neglect, and disenfranchisement and those who refuse to see, hear, or speak of it. Explaining her charged depiction of institutionalized racism, Piper states: “I have a couple of agendas. One is to depict in a kind of visceral way to white people what it’s like to be the object of this kind of thing. The other is to get white people to own the fears and pain that fuel racism, so that there can be a little bit more mutual comprehension between the black and white communities.”Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, PICTURE ID: Contemporary African American Works on Paper, March 14-June 14, 2020.