The Abolitionists in the Park

At once absurd and funny, critical and incisive, sexy and raunchy, strange and discomforting, Nicole Eisenman’s work crystallizes the complexity of the human predicament. Eisenman graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and promptly moved to New York’s Lower East Side, where she participated in a dynamic community of artists that included Nan Goldin and Nicola Tyson, among others. In the 1990s, she came to be associated with a movement known as identity politics, albeit in ways the artist often found reductive. Over the course of her career, Eisenman has experimented with drawing and print-making as well as sculpture, installation, and painting, the medium for which she is best-known. Her wide-ranging subjects address issues of power, representation, gender, and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, intermingling elements of fact and fantasy, history, and autobiography. Eisenman helped pave the way for the explosion of figuration in twenty-first century art, a mode to which she brings technical fluency, an understanding of the expressive potential of human gesture, a respect for abstraction, and a devotion to the tactile properties of materials, especially paint. Intimacy and human relationships as well as sociability and the social order play a key role in her work, as do activism and social justice, as witnessed by The Abolitionists in the Park.

A contemporary history painting that also serves as an allegory of life in the twenty-first century, The Abolitionists in the Park takes its inspiration from an actual event: "Occupy City Hall," which involved the month-long occupation of City Hall Park in downtown Manhattan by a broad coalition of activists associated primarily with Black Lives Matter. The occupation began on July 23, 2020, a week before the finalization of the city’s budget and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. United in their commitment to racial justice as well as their outrage against police violence, particularly the murder of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, the protestors at City Hall called for drastic cuts to the New York City Police Department’s budget and the transformation of policing as a whole. The title explicitly links the event commemorated here to the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century, establishing a genealogy of radical democratic politics.

The location of this particular demonstration provided Eisenman with the opportunity to reimagine a type of genre painting with longstanding roots in the Euro-American tradition: the outdoor park scene, where individuals gather for moments of rest, respite, sociability, and romantic encounters. Eisenman radicalizes these types of tableaux, reclaiming them for the very people they historically excluded, especially people of color, gay people, and transgender people. The artist also transforms the park (superficially understood as neutral) into an explicitly political setting, identifying it with defiance and opposition.

The Abolitionists in the Park alternately hews to and departs from factual reality. Eisenman takes creative liberties at the level of both style and content that heighten the painting’s emotional and psychological charge. The setting—City Hall Park—is concrete and accurate, from the design of the fence to the disposition of trees and bushes to the architecture of the buildings just beyond, the most proximate being the southeast corner of Tweed Courthouse. The time is early evening, the sky a deep turquoise mixed with streaks of purple. The scene is lit from both the back, specifically by a bright, almost blinding light (a nod, perhaps, to Vincent van Gogh, who used this pictorial device) that spills into the park, as well as from the front, by an invisible source. Graphic expressions of political conviction appear throughout the picture, as do several trompe l’oeil still-lifes. Invariably, these consist of the quotidian but important tools of any occupation, insofar as they sustain and protect the body, from a thermos to a clear hinged-lid plastic container and its sandwich.

Thirty-three figures of diverse race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are squeezed and stacked into the composition, entwined and entangled with one another. Some engage in shared acts, others in acts of simple generosity. The figures’ physical and structural interdependence evokes more ineffable forms of companionship. Here political union is presented as an extension of desire, comradeship, and an ethic of care and munificence. Rendered with varying degrees of finish and illusionism, Eisenman’s figures reflect careful attention to the stylistic traditions of Western painting. A few are life-like and recognizable. A majority, though, have either been subjected to distortion, made flat and schematic, or left deliberately incomplete. Throughout Abolitionists, a thrilling tension exists between the specific and the general, the finished and the unfinished, the illustrative and the abstract.

The Abolitionists in the Park bears witness to one of the most consequential moments of the early 2020s, a period of political reckoning that continues to resonate. Possessed of formidable allegorical value, it concretizes the social, emotional, and even sexual energy that binds people in action.