John Edmonds and Studio Lin: A Lesson in Looking with Reverence

A large-scale mural based on work by photographer John Edmonds, recipient of the Brooklyn Museum’s UOVO Prize, can be viewed on the facade of Bushwick’s UOVO: BROOKLYN facility. The mural is of his 2019 photograph Whose Hands?, which shows unidentified hands gripping an African sculpture modeled after a Baule maternity sculpture, accompanied by footnotes drawn from Susan Vogel’s book Baule: African Art, Western Eyes. It raises questions of ownership, collection and transmission of African art.