The America of career burglar Jack Black’s 1926 novel You Can’t Win is one of rampant crime, drug use, fugitivity, and punitive justice. For novelist and former New York Times art writer Randy Kennedy, it is also an America discernibly rigged to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of society’s vulnerable. In other words, Black’s America is in no small part the America of today. The artworks, historical documents, and books (including a rare first edition of Black’s book) that Kennedy assembled as curator of “You Can’t Win: Jack Black’s America” reflect the themes of social alienation and transgression that drew William Burroughs and others to Black’s story. At the same time, they testify to forms of structural violence that are as prevalent in our own era as they were at the cusp of the Great Depression.
In the images from Jack Lueders-Booth’s “Women Prisoners” series of color photographs, which he took between 1978 and 1985, a period in which the incarceration rate in the United States began to skyrocket, what comes across is a sense of ongoing vitality in the face of deadening circumstances. One image captures a black woman and a white woman snuggled together in solidarity; another features a woman posed on a bed surrounded by everyday objects of survival: photographs, art, books, a stereo.
Text by David Markus