Devin Troy Strother plays with familiar racist American stereotypes of Black people, repeating these signs and symbols until they start to feel meaningless. But systemic racism is still very much a part of everyones’ everyday lives — one can’t even turn on the radio without experiencing it. So what does Strother mean when he uses it repeatedly in his recent solo exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery, entitled, They Should Have Never Given You Niggas Money (closed December 22, 2015)?
In this show, he takes pleasure in capitalizing off of histories of racism, attempting to veil it through the lens of visual humor. It’s somewhat shocking to see a neon sign with the finely cursive “n-word” repeated over and over again, or a carpet covered with black face lips, but it leaves any viewer asking the simple question of: So what? Stare at any of these pieces long enough, however, and they start to feel “funny” in a dis-associative kind of way — just another reminder of racism or, in internet humor terms, it’s funny “because racism.”
