The Road to the White House: Race, Politics, and Groundwork

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Abstract:

Ground—unlike land—is a construct, a foundation for the idea of standing, central for both the representational regime in the arts and as a concept in sociopolitical and legal life. “The Road to the White House: Race, Politics, and Groundwork” focuses on the Black Lives Matter mural in Washington DC facing the White House to ask: Who has a right to the ground? What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenges to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life? The manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself—opens up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet and makes clear how urgent the work of the arts is for addressing vital questions in civic life. This short essay considers this mural as part of a larger tradition of “groundwork,” as both practical labor for civic society and as a prompt for vital methodological inquiry in the arts and humanities at large. It continues work on the understudied, foundational role of visual representation to construct rights and racialized subjecthood in the representational democracy of the United States.

Biography:

Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is an award-winning art and cultural historian whose books and edited volumes include The Rise (2014), the “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture magazine (2016), Carrie Mae Weems (2021), The Unseen Truth (2024), and the forthcoming Vision & Justice (2026). Lewis is the recipient of the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, an honorary degree from Pratt Institute, the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over 3 million views.