Cameron Rowland’s Difficult Art Broaches Heady Ideas About Slavery—But Who Is the Work For?

[The extended image captions above and below are styled according to the artist’s insistence.]
Few young artists anywhere have garnered as much attention as quickly as Cameron Rowland. Not yet 35 years old, they won a $625,000 MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the inaugural $100,000 Nomura Emerging Award in 2019, and their work is now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. But Rowland’s subject matter is tough and knotty, and seemin