The same goes for other types of art. The Freedom Rides Museum features quilts depicting the fight against racist travel through the South. Downtown, Michelle Browder, an artist integral to the city’s art movement, has created a 15-foot sculpture in honor of the enslaved black women who sacrificed themselves during the development of early gynecological medicine. I made it. In 2020, Browder helped lead artists create a Black Lives Matter street mural at the Montgomery site where enslaved Black people were once auctioned off. Completed on June 10, the mural symbolized the racism of that summer and drew attention to the city’s role in the slave trade.
Bill Traylor and Mose Tolliver, former sharecroppers born into slavery and black men with no formal training, are prominent Montgomery artists and part of the city’s rich artistic heritage.
“Some people hail Traylor as a pioneer of modern American art,” Ford says. “The young Mose Tolliver was probably inspired by seeing Traylor doing his thing on Monroe Street. [Tolliver] It wasn’t until his late 40s, when he became disabled in an accident at a furniture factory, that he began painting steadily. ”
Ford said new galleries and spaces such as King’s Canvas, Urban Dreams Fine Arts Center and 21 Dreams Arts & Culture will be built alongside the Montgomery Museum of Art, Armory Learning Arts Center and Montgomery Art Guild. They point out that they are joining the facility and offering a variety of options to artists. Creating and presenting works.
After the abolition of slavery and school desegregation, public art supported the “Lost Cause of the Confederate” myth, minimizing the brutality of slavery and white supremacy in the antebellum South. It put the Confederacy in the best light. The contemporary art movement is working to challenge this. Today, Montgomery has Confederate symbols and art that represent more people. Honesty history. City Hall’s official seal features both “Birthplace of Civil Rights” and “Cradle of the Confederacy.”
Alana Taylor, an ASU art professor whose research focuses on healing, symbolism, and technology, explains that art often moves people to question their ideas about these Confederate symbols. do. “You can’t undo the past, but at least look at it, evaluate what it was, talk to yourself about what you want to be, and try to move in this direction compared to how you thought it would be.” “You can see the benefits of moving on,” Taylor says.
Although the city established a commission in 2021 to evaluate the continued display of Confederate iconography, Alabama law prohibits the removal, renaming or destruction of monuments, statues, buildings or streets associated with the Confederacy.
Equal Justice Initiative as an Influence
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a Montgomery-based organization working to end mass incarceration and racial injustice, explores the connections between slavery and mass incarceration through museum content, monuments, and art. doing. Soil, the ASU art history professor, believes EJI’s work has inspired local artists to tell, or continue to tell, similar stories.
“Since [EJI’s] “When the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (NMPJ) opened in 2018, something changed in the arts community,” says Soil. “It’s hard to explain in words and profound to witness. In a way, NMPJ’s art and design has revealed to the world a history that has long been hidden. This area is a Confederate monument. This is unusual since the majority of…area artists are responding to this unprecedented monument and the history and stories it reveals in countless compelling ways. , while creating new visions for the future.”
Gilchrist agrees. “There was an awakening,” he says. “Not only artists who are fundamentally interested in social issues or who create art around social issues, but also artists who may have been creating art in a different way, I saw an opportunity to express myself, and now I can seize it, expressed in galleries and murals.”
portrait of courage
Art can uplift people whose names we may not know. Last summer, ASU’s arts department received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for community programming. For this project, they obtained surveillance photos from Alabama law enforcement of the first attempted Selma to Montgomery march that resulted in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” attack on march participants. The artists asked community members to help identify the participants in the photos and then transformed the photos into other works of art.
By honoring people for their courage in defending democracy, viewers can reflect on their own work. That’s what happened to Polk, the Montgomery artist who created the Selma to Montgomery March mural downtown to commemorate the march’s 50th anniversary. While working on the “Portrait of Courage” project, Paulk focused on one boy in the crowd in his marching photos.
“His hands are in his pockets,” she explains. “He’s very anxious and nervous, but he’s very young. So my decision was to paint him on a very narrow canvas, in black and white, with no background, just a single color, surrounded by black. And really focus on who he was, what he was doing there, how he felt. None of that had an answer for me. Historical movement, history. Even though only a small child was part of what became a public march, it was very dangerous for him to be there.”
“As I was drawing him, I felt like I should be a braver person than I can be, because look at what he did,” Polk says. “All this goes into making art, but when I’m painting it and you’re looking at it, none of those words are said. Everything has to be conveyed through the art itself. It won’t.”