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"In the Spirit of Martin: The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr." intends to educate a broad public, and it has a lengthy tour ahead of it. To communicate King's heroic story, text panels alternate with images and objects in a variety of styles and mediums. At the Bass, the show was installed in a space that echoed with the passionate voice of Dr. King himself, delivering the now famous speeches recorded in films and TV news clips. Sound, text and image combined to create a complex and moving experience, surely different for each viewer, depending on race, age and background.
A powerful reminder begins the narrative. The self-taught artist Thornton Dial bisects a slave ship lengthwise in his 8 1/2-foot-long mixed-medium sculpture. Above the hull are sails fashioned from painted tin; below decks lie rigid rows of painted black bodies in chains. A shocking photo of a 1935 lynching jolts us into the 20th century, followed by photographs of signs of segregation: drinking fountains and waiting rooms labeled "White" and "Colored." A lithograph by Charles White protests the racist treatment of black soldiers in World War II.
King emerged as a leader during the 1955-56 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, and his campaign of nonviolent resistance against unjust laws and customs gradually drew national attention. By the 1960s, the strength of his cause and the bravery of his followers had engaged many sympathetic artists. That decade is the richest in the exhibition: it includes a 1963 painting by May Stevens, seen as if looking from inside a glass door with "White Only" printed in reverse. Outside, a shadowy black figure peers in. Norman Rockwell's 1964 image of a tiny, resolute black girl carrying her schoolbooks, protected in front and behind by large white men with armbands reading ". Deputy Marshall," gives white viewers at least something to be proud of in the enforcement of school integration by federal law. Pride fades, though, with Andy Warhol's 1964 silkscreen on paper, Birmingham Race Riot, taken from a 1963 newspaper photo showing white police officers setting their dogs on peaceful black demonstrators. Warhol used this stomach-curdling image in several combinations, colors and sizes, challenging his own theory about mass media that "if you look at a gruesome picture over and over, it doesn't mean anything anymore."
After King was murdered in 1968, his image as hero and martyr moved many artists. His portrait is drawn, painted, embroidered, carved. He appears as preacher, leader, haloed saint in works by Faith Ringgold, Howardena Pindell, Raymond Saunders.
Some works from the '90s show the effects of historical distance. Glenn Ligon considers the difference between King and Malcolm X, who favored more aggressive tactics. The two were seen as antagonists in their own lifetimes, but in a tour de force of conceptual/political imagery, Ligon, in his black oil-stick-and-acrylic Malcolm, Martin, simply repeats the two names in block letters across and down his canvas, at first with space between the names but progressively overlapping them more densely, until the two names become merged into a single field of blackness, their missions unified in memory. [Curated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the show is on view at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Jan. 4-Mar. 30, and at the International Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, ., May 15-July 27. It will travel through March 2004.]
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