An open hand, wooden block letters, a cowbell, a suspended head. While these might have any number of connotations, each has a particularly nefarious one in Kevin Demery’s solo exhibition “A Lesson Before Dying” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: innocence, forced tutelage, slavery, execution. These signifiers describe the racism embedded in each object and the lived experience of Black Americans—the subject of much of his work.
Demery, an instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute, emphasizes conceptual sculpture within his studio practice. Relying on the charged histories and embedded meanings of commonplace objects—afro picks, crucifixes, police batons—Demery minimally alters and presents them in multiples, exaggerating their presence and mimicking the outsized effect these objects have on Black Americans.
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The most arresting works in the exhibition are the wind chimes. Three monumental black-painted heads, flattened into two-dimensional profiles, hang from the gallery’s cavernous ceiling, each suspended by a silver chain looped through a hole at the crown. From the base of each neck dangle sets of black metal chimes, each adorned with additional objects. In His Bones Will Blossom (2024), it is cowbells. The affixation of these two sonorous devices to a black profile connotes their historic use as anti-runaway devices on enslaved people. Though silent in the exhibition, the absence of sound only intensifies the memory of their tones—and the threat their silence continues to suggest.
Adjacent to the windchimes are the anagram puzzles: words engraved onto planks of wood with wood block letters that fit in the voids. Some letters, removed from their contexts, are rearranged to form new words. In this way, “Enslaver” becomes “Erased,” “Indigenous” becomes “undoing,” and “Incarceration” becomes “trained.” Presented as a group, these anagrams are analogs for the puzzling experience of combing through bureaucratic language to decipher true meanings. This frustration is intentional, as it is through the slowness of confusion that greater control can be established. While Demery’s anagrams here paint a grim picture, it is limned with hope. If “Incarcerated” contains “trained,” could it instead contain “care”?
The final artwork in this exhibition is The Pledge (2024). Nine plaster casts of hands, painted to resemble either Black or white flesh, are arranged in a sequence that draws on symbolic gestures from Christian iconography, the Black Power movement and popular culture. A White hand with its index and middle fingers crossed—signifying either good luck or the cross of Jesus Christ—is flanked by two Black hands held open, evoking innocence. Another White hand forms a circle with the thumb and index finger, a gesture representing the incarnation of Christ, followed by a Black hand with the ring finger and thumb retracted—a formation known as “The Shocker” and associated with sexual intercourse—which in turn is followed by a clenched Black fist, the enduring emblem of Black Power. The discordant and often humorous pairing of these vastly different symbols is a reenactment of the multiplicity of meaning that can be found in any object. A single hand can convey both innocence and aggression, the difference created only by a subtle rearrangement of digits.
As Frederick Douglass first argued, representation—the politics of visibility—lies at the core of democracy. In this context, the relationship between sign and signified is not merely semantic but potentially life-threatening. The livelihood of Black Americans has long depended on the visibility and legibility of certain signs. As structural commitments to racial diversity continue to erode, the urgency of scrutinizing symbols and signifiers becomes all the more critical. When people and objects are already burdened with conflicting meanings and concealed histories, Demery’s exhibition stands as a case study—one that confronts the embedded racism of this country and explores how it might be transformed. The hope, of course, is that such transformation moves us forward.
Kevin Demery’s “A Lesson Before Dying” is on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art through August 10, 2025 as part of the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards exhibition.
