The Essential Spirit: On the Work of Stephen Towns

In Stephen Towns's painting After the Shift (2020), the symbols the artist has added to the image of a Black miner from West Virginia—which Towns selected from a suite of archival photographs—are doing a great deal of work. Towns has painted in a headlamp fixed to the central figure's cap, thus identifying him as a miner, though he's dressed in a leisure outfit—a coat and a buttoned-up shirt. The combination of work accoutrement and recreational clothing suggests there is more to this man than just his labor; he has a life outside of the mine. In this composition, Towns has also painted in a half-twirled United States flag, signaling where this man is geographically, culturally, and historically. That is to say, the flag places this Black man within the twisted history of the varied types of labor utilized to construct this 21st-century world superpower: migrant labor, conscripted labor, stolen labor, domestic, political, and organizational labor, intellectual labor, unseen labor, unacknowledged labor.

All these forms of labor, in the aggregate, are constitutive of the United States. This nation is the progeny of industry. However, it has long been and is still the case that the kinds of labor that require non-vocational education and specialized training and the kinds performed by managers at the executive level are the most highly compensated and the most publicly recognized. But Stephen Towns isn't interested in those types of workers. He has sorted through photo archives in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and South Carolina looking with great care and diligence for those who, like him, have worked with their hands most of their lives.

As Towns confided to me, "I feel I come from very everyday people." More explicitly, in a 2022 interview in Forbes magazine, he says, "There is a narrative that we come from kings and queens, but I probably didn't come from a king or a queen, I probably came from a laborer that was captured and sold into slavery and there is just as much importance in the people in the background as there is in the people on the top." The artist, born the youngest of 11 children in Lincolnville, South Carolina, to a father who worked in construction and a mother who was a domestic worker, has worked most of his life. He has worked in retail, has stocked surgical equipment for operating rooms, worked in factories and for after-school programs. He knows from personal experience how physical laborers are often disregarded, and in his paintings and story quilts he refuses to let manual labor be mistaken for menial—low-status, unskilled, inferior.

In After the Shift, Towns has also painted golden sparrows with iridescent wings flitting around the miner, symbolizing the worker's essential spirit—what some may call the spark of divinity. Having grown up in a household of Jehovah's Witnesses and having studied Renaissance and Byzantine painting on his way to his BFA from the University of South Carolina, he's sought to represent that divine aspect of humanity by embellishing these portraits with the natural wonders of house sparrows and monarch butterflies. The viewer can also catch glimpses of this spirit in the bits of mica flakes and glitter that Towns secrets inside the acrylic and oil paints of After the Shift. In other portraits, the artist is even more emphatic; in the paintings The Crossing Guards and the Brewster Hospital Nurses series, he has surrounded the figures' heads with coronas of pocked copper leaf. Dressed in their work uniforms, these essential workers face the viewer, for the most part stolidly returning our gaze, reminding us that, for all the gentleness of their care of those in their charge, like the monarch butterfly, they are also resilient.

More than resilience, the power to migrate, to change one's circumstances, is signified by Towns's story quilts, particularly the ones that represent Ona Judge. In 1796, when Judge was an enslaved maid to the first US president, George Washington, she took her freedom by escaping the president's...