We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask is a project by Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born artist who lives and works in New York.Focusing on the history of car bombings in the Lebanese wars, the project includes a 17-minutes long video and a series of 43 photographs. The allusive title, We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask, refers to the impossibility of prognosis, less in terms of weather conditions, and more in terms of the future historical, geopolitical, and cultural conditions.
Raad has created a work specifically for the List Art Center lobby. The large four-part mural depicts the post 9/11 sociopolitical landscape. The background of each wall of the lobby is painted in a different shade of blue, referencing the sky over New York on September 11, 2001. The rough, sketchy drawings are digitally manipulated courtroom drawings that the artist compiled for a number of years after 9/11, left intentionally unfinished to remain ambiguous in origin and reference.

Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Proposal for wall drawing