American Art Collaborative

Rivers was one of the bad boys of the New York art world. He was a poet, lecturer, jazz musician, and painter who imagined that "white people probably think I'm nuts, black people think I'm insulting." Identification Manual combines phantom images of murdered civil rights marchers with pictures of beautiful black women and products designed to bleach dark skin. On the right, two sliding panes of glass afford different racial identities to a figure of a woman.

A white artist creating racially explicit art in the 1960s was controversial, and Rivers liked to give his works clinical, deadpan titles that made the images even more shocking. Identification Manual conveys the difficulty faced by blacks and whites trying to find their way through the heated conflicts of the civil rights movement.

A quotation from Lord Acton, a famously liberal historian in nineteenth-century England, accompanied the title. It read: "The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities."

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006