Entering the contemporary art space located just a few minutes\u2019 walk from my home in the Hudson Valley last fall, I had no idea what to expect. Gallerist Jack Shainman had just opened an exhibition by the Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi. Entitled \u201cDemocratic Intuition,\u201d Mokgosi\u2019s opus fills all three floors of the stunning 30,000-square-foot building called The School. The artist\u2019s massive paintings feature jarring mash-ups of people, places, objects, and animals that draw from the lives of the people of southern Africa. To write that the exhibition fills the space barely captures how the paintings burst off of the walls, confronting viewers with image overload and leaving the visitor with the challenge of coping with the unexpected discomfort the images conjure.<\/p>\n

Mokgosi\u2019s paintings are gorgeous, with saturated colors that sting the eyes. At least one of the pictorial pieces is paired with a canvas covered with dense, hand-written verbiage that maps the artist\u2019s philosophical explorations. In that piece and others, Mokgosi makes visible his desire to reveal in painstaking detail his underlying thought process. But unlike the work of many other contemporary artists, Mokgosi\u2019s powerful imagery requires no verbal explanation. In truth, Mokgosi gives the game away in a modestly scaled, straight-on self-portrait that the gallery\u2019s curators had the wisdom to hang in a light-filled back-hall space that allows the achingly honest and unsparing self-image to stand on its own.<\/p>\n

It is there, in the quiet of that space, that Mokgosi\u2019s intention is laid bare. The artist\u2019s eyes, staring straight ahead, burn into the viewers\u2019 eyes with unblinking confrontation. Mokgosi\u2019s expression seems to hide a complex mixture of tightly held messages. A polite invitation is not one of them. Instead, his expression signals a demand to those of us who take for granted our place in a predominantly white, privileged, first-world society to step outside our self-imposed indifference to the lives of minorities, people of color, the poor, and the disadvantaged. Mokgosi implores us to open our eyes. \u201cWe are here,\u201d he demands. \u201cLook<\/em> at us. See <\/em>us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mokgosi\u2019s paintings were still churning around in my brain when I happened upon reporting and devastating video footage from ProPublica about the tragic death of Carlos Gregoria Hernandez Vasquez. Carlos, a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan taken into custody by ICE, died of flu-related complications in the bathroom of a quarantine cell at a border station in Weslaco, Texas, in the early hours of May 20, 2019. The crime \u2014 and the shame \u2014 is that Carlos didn\u2019t die because he was ill with a 103-degree fever. He died because he was denied proper care. He died because the guards at the facility acted as if his life was of so little value that they ignored instructions to check on his condition every few hours. He died because the border-patrol station lacked the proper facilities, personnel, and adequate funds to care for sick, quarantined children. He died because the Trump administration made the cynical and cruel decision to punish children like Carlos whose parents\u2019 only crime was to make the heart-rending decision to send their loved ones alone on a dangerous journey to the U.S. border in a desperate bid to find a safer life.<\/p>\n

Carlos is one of twenty-three immigrants \u2013 including two children under the age of ten \u2014 who have died in custody since the Trump administration came into office. In the end, the sad truth is that Carlos Gregoria Hernandez Vasquez and the others died because we just didn\u2019t bother to see<\/em> them.<\/p>\n