Nancy Kienholz on Five Car Stud

Nancy Kienholz talks about Five Car Stud, which she spent several years restoring prior to the exhibition at LACMA.

Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud (1969-72) is on view at LACMA from September 4, 2011--January 15, 2012, is a powerful work that depicts the hatred many white Americans expressed toward racial minorities and interracial partnerships in the not-too-distant-past; it stands as Kienholz's major civil rights work. In this horrifying life-size tableau, four automobiles and a pickup truck are arranged on a dirt floor in a dark room with their headlights illuminating a shocking scene: a group of white men exacting their gruesome "punishment" on an African American man whom they have discovered drinking with a white woman. Commenting on the work and its theme of racial oppression, Kienholz said at the time, "If six to one is unfair odds in my tableau, then 170 million to 20 million is sure as hell unfair odds in my country." Although our society increasingly considers itself postracial, Five Car Stud is a harsh reminder of a shameful part of our history whose traces still linger. It was seen only in Germany in 1972 and has since remained in storage in Japan for almost forty years. This is its first public showing in the United States.

This presentation is organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and is jointly presented in Los Angeles by the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with support from the Getty Foundation.

For more information, http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/edward-kienholz-five-car-stud

Video production: Alexa Oona Schulz

Category:

Education

Tags:

• contemporary art
• museum
• art
• Kienholz