Breadcrumb Navigation:
Home > Featured Stories > Embracing Diversity > January 2009 > The Visible Man: Race and Identity in AmericaThe Visible Man: Race and Identity in America
Artist McArthur Freeman in front of Brooks Hall.
By David Hunt, News Services
Artist McArthur Freeman ('08) leans back in his chair and takes a moment to consider one of his own works, a painting titled, “Strange Fruit.” It’s a narrative piece – a picture that tells a story – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to read. A lot depends on the interaction between the art and the audience.
“It’s a dialogue,” Freeman says.
The painting depicts a Pinocchio character reaching up to touch a human head hanging from a tree, like an apple. The head, which is alive, looks down wide-eyed at Pinocchio, who seems tentative but curious. Both characters are black.
On the surface, the picture seems innocuous, a new interpretation of an age-old fairy tale. But there’s more to it, Freeman says.
You may view the painting differently once you learn that the title, “Strange Fruit,” is taken from a song recorded by Billie Holliday in 1939 and refers to the lynching of African-American men.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The painting was influenced in part, Freeman says, by the book, “Without Sanctuary,” a collection of photographs and postcards that were taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout the United States in the early 20th century. In some of the photos, crowds of onlookers – including children – pose for the camera, laughing and smiling.
“The most saddening thing was not the bodies that were hanging there or burning,” Freeman says. “It was the audience, because they were smiling and they were dressed up and they had come to that particular place to watch.”
Freeman wonders what beliefs and attitudes led seemingly average people to participate in – and even celebrate – violence against African-Americans. He thinks some answers may be found in the myths, stories and images that run through our culture.
“People tell us things, we pass on things to others, there are fears that we have, there are myths that we carry, and they are embedded in our culture whether we recognize it or not,” Freeman says. “They’re in our movies and they’re in our politics. These myths, fantasies, things that seem to be invented or created, and seem to be innocuous – they are very real and they affect us in very physical ways.”
They may help explain why incidents of violence and discrimination against African-Americans continue to occur while social and political barriers to civil rights have eased. In a country where presidential candidate Barack Obama receives the votes of millions of white Americans and Oprah Winfrey is called “arguably the world’s most powerful woman” by CNN, African-Americans as a group face economic, educational and social disadvantages in many areas.
“Sometimes I’ll pick what I call ‘wonderland events,’ which are events that seem like they should be extremely absurd, that don’t seem like they should happen in this day and age. But they do and they’re there and there are a lot of them, not just a few,” Freeman says. “And when they do happen, it’s the kind of thing that really makes you question how much progress has been made.”
Freeman, who graduated this spring with a master’s degree in art and design from North Carolina State University, often uses characters from fairy tales and popular culture, such as Alice in Wonderland, Aunt Jemima and Pinocchio, to populate his narrative works.
“I started working with images from Alice in Wonderland first and one of the reasons I chose Alice is because she chases after this white rabbit into this other space where the logic she has come to know is very different,” Freeman says. “Everything is upside down and topsy-turvy. It’s described as a place of absurdity, where she thinks that things should work right, like she would expect, but they don’t. She’s an outsider.”
That mirrors the African-American experience in some ways, Freeman says.
“African-Americans have been seen as the abject part of American society – the outcasts – hated and feared and degraded in many ways,” he says. “At the same time, they have had to question who they are, as Alice does. They’ve faced the challenge of having to be a part of that same society and also wanting to be fully American, wanting to be human, wanting all these other things. It’s this kind of strange relationship, being a part of it but then being rejected from it at the same time.”
At NC State, Freeman took advantage of the university’s Advanced Media Lab to begin working with 3-D modeling and animation. While he hasn’t changed the themes of his work, Freeman enjoys the added flexibility of a digital workflow.
“A gallery will reach a limited number of people. It creates a different type of dialogue in terms of how it’s written and talked about, but it is rather limited, which is one of the reasons I’m interested in working with animation and digital media, to reach a wider audience,” he says. “You’re not going to reach the average 17-year-old in a journal, whereas on YouTube, yeah, you can.”
