Boy Shot for Bike, 1981

Boy Shot for Bike is part of a series for which Lawson—an artist associated with the Pictures Generation and whose practice is often concerned with art’s capacity for social critique—used images of violent-crime victims sourced from the New York Post as his references, inserting images from mass media into the historical genre of portraiture. The removal of these images from their original context offers an unsettling contradiction—the victims are rendered anony mous, yet their presentation as works of art encourages the viewer to linger upon them, underscoring a shared cul tural desensitization to the violence documented in everyday life. Significantly, this work was featured in MOCA’s land mark 1989 exhibition A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation, which focused on a central artistic “crisis” of the 1980s: artistic representation in a period increasingly impacted by mass media, advertising, and consumption.