"In this 1993 piece titled
In the Hood, from his show at Mnuchin Gallery in New York, all Hammons has done is nail the hood from a sweatshirt up on the wall, and let it stand for what it’s like to be young and black and male. It’s just a scrap of industrial cloth, but hanging it on high evokes lynchings and maybe even Christ. The crude severing of hood from hoodie evokes a body torn limb from limb.
The hood itself becomes a metonym for all the black bodies in this country – or maybe it stands for how we, as a society, are willing to condense all those very different bodies and souls into a single image of them. That’s what’s called racism."
