Service: Colin
Quashie’s Mural cum Art Installation for the
School of Government
at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
a review
by
Frank Martin
Noted as a controversial artist, Quashie, based in Charleston,
South Carolina, undertook the completion of this project sustained by the
patronage of the
Local Government Federal Credit Union. The painting commemorates
the contributions of African Americans to North Carolina’s local history, and
addresses omissions from popular cultural memory. The circumstances of this
image, and its commission offer a rich opportunity for social commentary and a dialogue
on culture, race, reasoning, community, and the aesthetics of public memorials
in America.
Although Service is presented as a traditional mural
painting, its placement, combined with the artist’s contrived design motifs and
the mural’s contextual cultural inferences, morphs the work’s significance away
from being a “history painting” into a nexus of relevant political issues. Approximately
5’ high and 50’ long, the figures represented are rendered in thin, translucent
oil glazes. Despite its concessions to the conventions of naturalistic figurative
art, this work’s conceptual richness and informative, amusing, complexity make it
more than a simple mural; it is a “conversation piece” in the very best sense
of that term.
The ideas suggested in this work obliquely confront visitors
to the ground floor dining room of the Knapp-Sanders Building on the Chapel
Hill campus. Operating more like a satirically conceived performative
installation/sculpture rather than the simple mural it coyly seeks to delude us
it could be, its complex ideas correspond with the socially critical and ironic
implications associated with other works by Quashie, whose rambunctious
contentions with our American culture often simultaneously entertain while
interrogating the presumed motivations and assumptions of his audiences.
Quashie seduces us into believing that this image is “safe” and the mural seems
initially to offer few surprises: that is to say, it does the work that it was
expected to do by representing a series of figures of historic significance. Service,
however deals with more than simple appearances.
The image’s controversy begins with where it has been
situated. Instead of placing the mural in the upstairs atrium, beside earlier
historical murals, Quashie has positioned it downstairs on the ground floor. The
mural is intended to celebrate images of African-Americans omitted in the past from
the official historical record. Its location by the cafeteria underscores the
reality that for many years past, in North Carolina’s history (and throughout
the South), the only possibility for African-Americans to be employed in such a
space as this School of Government Building would have been as workers in
the kitchen or in some form of menial labor.
Acknowledging historic exclusion of African-Americans,
Quashie, places the “Greensboro Four,” Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, Jibreel
Khazan (formely known as Ezell Blair, Jr.), and Franklin McCain, at eye level
with the audience, shown larger than life, emphasizing their importance in
acting as catalytic agents, fighting for desegregation, having initiated the
historic Greensboro sit-in. They are represented as chefs or “fry-cooks”
working literally in the fire of the alchemical kitchen of social change. Moreover,
as personifications of forces for change, they are closest to the modern
audience in the fictive space, and closest to the actual kitchen of the
real-space restaurant. The “Greensboro Four” shape our experience in
the metaphorical restaurant, and have helped “cook up” what we are being
offered as a transformative experience (our contemporarily enhanced equality
and inclusion).
The power of this presentation is the fact that Quashie has
now chosen to segregate the images of blacks even as they are gradually being
included in the official canons of history. This separation is itself
politically interesting and significant. Quashie has elliptically attacked the
racial context of the commission for the mural, despite or because it is
intended as an homage to Civil Rights and "black" history. He
instinctively rejected the idea of placing this mural with the
earlier historical murals and offers instead something unique and unexpected. In place
of what could have been a repetitive, pointless gesture, we have a dynamic,
politicized conversation; witty, amusing, and not entirely pleasant. No
solutions to the confusions of racial conversations can be achieved by a
pretense that the past never happened. Understanding this (for both artist and
patron) is the difference between generating interesting, meaningful art, as
contrasted with stale, empty or meaningless gestures.
The representations of the Civil Rights workers who staged
the lunch counter sit-ins at Greensboro’s Woolworths Department Store anchors
the image as a visual metaphor, thus, we may sweep into the matrix of a
contrived environment to locate a history painting in the realist tradition.
With the main protagonists shown in fry-cook's outfits, the visual pun is
established, a wry tease upon which the mural’s title, Service, can now play
continually. The work raises several variations on this theme simultaneously:
first, the fact that African-Americans were refused service at segregated
establishments (until the 1960s); second, the service to our country that these
courageous students and their fore-bearers and counterparts provided in risking
their lives to enhance our understanding of the inequities of the time; third,
how these Civil Rights workers are serving the general public in helping to
create a more equitable American society based on their risky venture; and
finally, the fact that most often Africa-Americans were and perhaps still are
associated with service or domestic positions in our American popular
conscience.
Is this by the artist’s intention? Yes and no. Some is
“happy accident,” some is clever and careful contrivance. However, this
representation of a group meal invites comparison with another art historical
representation, bringing to mind Leonardo's, (yes, as in da Vinci’s), Last
Supper. Not only does the lunch motif position this work squarely in some kind
of comparative contention with Western tradition, but its contextual shift to
“secular” and “legal” as opposed to a “religious” and “spiritual” cultural
impact says something about a significant, modern human shift as well.
The main point is this image is a conceptual work being
presented deceptively as a
straight-forward painting. The grouping of figures in the lunchroom setting is
a pretext for why such a diverse collection of individuals may be arranged in a
relational association, and use of this metaphor benefits the work’s overall
conceptual structure. The allegorical luncheonette offers a fitting setting for
the work’s historical theme. The image’s messages are transmitted as much by
its concept, location and context, as by who or what has been represented.
Beyond the contextual politics, the individuals who are
shown in the image, were suggested by a committee established specifically for
that purpose. Quashie has blogged his research into the lives of the diverse
figures, including: pamphleteer,
David Walker (born in 1785), author of an
early anti-slavery document urging the enslaved populace to rebel against their
captors; writer
Charles Chesnutt (born 1858); the amazing
Pea Island Life Savers under the command of Richard Etheridge; civil rights activist,
Ella Jo Baker (born 1903); concluding with historian
John Hope Franklin (born 1915).
Many of the details from the historical record as well as the artist’s thoughts
on his process are included at
www.quashie.com.
As a final nod to his own connection to the legacy of
institutionalized slavery, Quashie indicates his own ancestry as a product of
the African diaspora by showing an anonymous slave couple in panel number
seven, using as his models an image of his own mother, shown in profile looking
upward and to the viewer’s right, and an interpolated image of his father. This
element of personal history in an image about exclusion, courage in the face of
discrimination, and the search for equality, a struggle for a “seat at the
table,” is itself a powerful statement regarding the impact of constructs of
race on contemporary society, as it were, up to the very creation of the
artwork itself. This dialectical approach to artistic representation is full of
intrigue and interest. To our collective benefit, I suggest that we have been
“quashied,” a verb, meaning here to cause us to consider, even against our
will, the complexities of America's legacy of law, race, and our ever-curious
modes of reasoning.
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