“And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description,” Claudia Rankine repeats four times in Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) a narrative poem that grapples with the insidious and indelible effects of widespread racism. The image of the American black man is unequivocally linked to this country’s racist history, and with “Brown,” her first solo gallery show, British-born artist Erica Deeman joined a centuries-old initiative seeking to counter negative images of African American men in the public consciousness.

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