No Humans Involved: After Sylvia Wynter Favorite
In this series featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, artist Alexandra Bell edited headline pages from the New York Daily News in 1989 concerning the case of the Central Park 5. Through redaction, highlighting, and censoring, Bell shows how the teens accused of this crime were painted as a pack of animals by the media. She highlights words like "wolfpack" and "gang" and blurs out photos of the accused to show how influential language and the media can be in the perpetuation of racialized violence..
The title of the series is a reference to critical theorist Sylvia Wynter's 1994 essay titled No Humans Involved in which Wynter responds to a radio report about the acquittal of four LA police officers who beat Rodney King. The title is another reference to the influence of media in criminal cases and the ways black bodies are often rendered nonhuman.