The Unruly Art of McArthur Freeman

THE UNRULY ART OF MCARTHUR FREEMAN M ichael D. Harris M cArthur Freeman works in an unruly manner. His work resists categorization while it challenges assumptions and stereotypical mythologies. He combines Pinocchio and Sambo, or Pinocchio and Tom and Jerry with Mammy Two Shoes to make provocative visual statements about contemporary visual culture and the presence of myths, fantasies, and stereotypes. He says, "The work is about... exploring, confronting , and creating distorted images of self in the form of myths, stereotypes, and fantasies, particularly around ideas about blackness and race."1 Like the work of so many African American artists, Freeman's work is about self-perception and misperception. The Fort Lauderdale native was educated at the University of Florida and received a graduate degree from Cornell University before beginning his residency at Davidson College. He is thoughtful , informed, talented, and has created a unique vision in his work. He questions the popular culture imagery which informs so many young people in this country and wonders how seeing blackface imagery in Tom and Jerry cartoons or Sambo in Bugs Bunny cartoons affects one's view of blackness. Freeman's work is not rooted in insecurity and identity; rather, his foundation is a confident sense of self and the complications of being black in the United States. And being an artist. The work grows from an acute social awareness of the contradictions and atrocities of race, as well as a general sympathy with the way our social environment engenders assumptions and desensitizes people to the feelings of those who are different. He indicates that the kinds of things that influence the work are the fact that in Fitzgerald, Georgia, the proms were segregated until the late 1990s, and still there is a white prom and a general school prom that whites do not attend. As documented by the exhibition and publication, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,2 children were let out of school in the American South to watch lynchings [terrorist events?] and a 1 1 0 - N k a J o u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t Soap Box, 2005, oil on canvas Fall 2 0 0 7 N k a « 1 1 1 series of postcards were created to commemorate them. Also, racist kitsch objects populated thousands and thousands of homes for most of the twentieth century. He asks, "Where do those images live now? How have they affected their consciousness? What role do they play in their self-perception and notions about black people?"3 He seems to link these horrors to the case of Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, who was sodomized by the New York City police with a plunger, implying that violence against blacks continues in new forms, just as the stereotypes and fantasies that maim and disfigure society persist. Freeman says, "I look at a lot of the absurd things that happen now and have happened in the past and it's hard for me to reconcile their existence or the fact that they still exist, and the many ways we don't acknowledge them."4 Freeman's work correctly accounts for the homogeneity of certain cultural influences that have increased in force because of the growth of popular media, mass media saturation, and the shared experience that crosses social, economic, and racial lines through television, radio, movies, magazines, and video. Blacks and whites have been exposed to the Pinocchio tale, Tom and Jerry cartoons, Alice in Wonderland, and racist imagery that has been embedded in cartoon imagery, popular media, and the derogatory assumptions and norms they reinforce. His wonderful paintings are just as disarming and as absurd as cartoons might be on Saturday morning television, or in a Disney or Pixar animated movie production but his agenda is counter-hegemonic; he uses irony and signification to undermine the originals as viewers come into contact with distortions of their established fables and the jarring juxtapositions of the new characters inhabiting them. Pinocchio has become a regular character in Freeman's fables, but his desired transformation into a boy has layers of...