Ronald Lockett

Ronald Lockett (1965–1998), The Enemy Amongst Us, 1995

Paint, pine straw, metal grate, tin, nails, on wood, 50 x 53 in.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation

Despair found meaning through outrage in a series of pieces occasioned by the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995. Part city skylines and part shantytowns, these pieces shred the myths of the melting pot, the social mosaic, and the American Experiment. The series, which includes Oklahoma, Timothy, April Nineteenth (The Number), Awakening, Conspiracy, and The Enemy Amongst Us, is reminiscent of frayed and tattered improvisational patchwork quilts. Let us remain mindful, as Lockett was, that one of the dark motives for the Oklahoma bombing was white supremacy, that, far from being an act of maniacal desperation, the Oklahoma bombing was an intentional spectacle of terror, as lynchings once were.