Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada)

Greenbook, New York State (1961)

Date2019

MediumArchival pigment print on paper

DimensionsFramed: 10 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (26.7 x 62.2 x 3.8 cm)

Credit LineMarieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Object numberR2024.25

ClassificationsMultiple

Not on view

Description"The Negro Motorist Green Book" was a US guidebook for black drivers, published by Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966, during the Jim Crow era. Because public transportation in the United States was segregated, black Americans were—providing they could afford it—drawn to car ownership, and they took to driving in great numbers. Though their private vehicles spared them the ignominy of being forced to stand so that whites could sit, driving was a dangerous activity: black drivers were routinely harassed by the police, were refused lodging or service by white hotel and restaurant owners, or suffered physical violence at the hands of white mobs. The Green Book allowed black drivers to avoid the many pitfalls of a perilous car journey by providing a guide to lodging, restaurants, and gas stations that would not refuse service.

In her eponymous work Greenbook (1961) (2019), Kapwani Kiwanga printed and framed fifty-two extracts from the 1961 edition of the Green Book, making manifest how racial differences tend to index differentials in agency: white bodies command power, recognition, and resources that are unavailable, or accessible only at great cost, to nonwhite bodies. (https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/kapwani-kiwanga-galerie-tanja-wagner-berlin-ana-teixeiera-pinto-2019/)