A new exhibition in Breonna Taylor’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, will bring artists together to pay tribute to the 26-year-old emergency room technician, who was fatally shot in her own home by police on March 13, 2020.
Titled Promise, Witness, Remembrance, the show will take place across five galleries at the city’s Speed Art Museum from April 7, including the portrait of Taylor that Amy Sherald painted for Vanity Fair’s September 2020 cover. Word artist Glenn Ligon’s neon artwork “Aftermath” (2020) will also feature, highlighting how former president Donald Trump’s policy heightened racial tension.
Elsewhere, Kerry James Marshall’s 1993 artwork “Lost Boys: AKA BB” will be on display, alongside pieces by Nick Cave, Theaster Gates, For Freedoms founder Hank Willis Thomas, Sam Gilliam, Kahlil Joseph, Nari Ward, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Lorna Simpson.
Besides addressing the memory and legacy of Breonna Taylor, the exhibition will cover systemic racism and police brutality more broadly, as well as the unprecedented Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the country and the globe in the wake of her death. According to a February interview with The Art Newspaper, the show was curated in close collaboration with Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, who has acted as “a guiding voice in informing the exhibition”.
Over the course of the exhibition, the gallery will waive its usual entry fee. Read more information on the show here.
Promise, Witness, Remembrance will run at Speed Art Museum from April 7 to June 6.