America’s Turbulent History Gets Reimagined for a Browser-Based Exhibition

The advantages of showing art online are abundant: there’s higher viewership, very little overhead cost, and global accessibility, among other benefits. Most online art showcases, however, are no match for the pristine white walls of Chelsea, at least when it comes to the inherent prestige and ability to sell artwork—important elements for the survival of both artists and annexed professionals. With a sleek and polished interface, well-curated solo exhibitions, and an emphasis on selling the works just like a standard gallery, new online art platform Fine Art Club is looking to change this.

After showcasing artist Tyrell Winston, fine Art Club’s second show features works by Rachel Libeskind. The platform operates in an artist-to-artist format, meaning that the previously featured artist decides whom Fine Art Club will show next. Previous exhibitions, along with accompanying studio visits and 20-question segments with the artist, remain archived on the platform for everlasting viewing, a facet that would be impossible to replicate in a traditional galley.

Rachel Libeskind from Julie Allen on Vimeo.

It Was a Common Night, Rachel Libeskind’s ongoing exhibition at Fine Art Club, consists of a series of oil on paper works depicting scenes of an older America at night. Shadowy, horse-mounted figures, ominously lit houses, and hovering crows populate the works along with a stark title and date at the bottom, providing each work with a sense of formality and truthfulness that is ultimately farcical; these are fictional scenes, as interpreted by Libeskind.

“I find there is a pervasive myth about the 'American Night'—this landscape where the pilgrims and the pioneers manifested their destiny, sleeping under nights, defeating the native people,” Libeskind tells The Creators Project. “This landscape has been sold to us many times, in childhood books, in spaghetti Westerns; the sweet cool air of the dark American night soothes us to sleep with a promise of tomorrow in which all our dreams await us.”

Yet Libeskind does not wish to promote this myth with her own form of fiction. Instead, she confronts a wrongful legacy head on: “To me, this really is a myth, a well constructed one—the American Night is deeply haunted. The American Night is where black men are brutally tortured and lynched, the American Night is where conscious or unconscious women are raped and left for dead,” elaborates Libeskind. “The dates and titles of the works in It was a Common Night are there to evoke historical moments—from the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, through the terror of the Jim Crow era. Those dates are there to remind us that the American Night has been haunted since it was created.”

Accompanying the online exhibition was a one-day pop-up of Libeskind’s work at the Lower East Side’s Lazy Susan Gallery. The works on the website were temporarily housed in a classic white-walled space open to the public, with the addition of on-the-spot tattoos for fearless visitors. Although the exhibition briefly manifested itself IRL, the show is primarily meant as an online experience that fuses the professional nature of normal gallery shows with the accessibility and freedom that online platforms provide.

It Was a Common Night is indefinitely on view on Fine Art Club. Go to Rachel Libeskind’s website for more of her works.

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