The mural in the foyer of the university’s chapel has become a contentious issue, a WPA commission to visually chronicle the history of kentucky, but it’s difficult to imagine what depiction would be deemed politically correct these days, or maybe the day after tomorrow. The school administration says we’ll just move it, no big deal, but they know it’s part of the building and can only be destroyed. Black students find the mural highly offensive because they’re depicted as field workers, but the history of this country and the history of the world are flush with offenses against people and pretending they never happened won’t make anyone safe, as a fact just the opposite.
Changing the world by replacing the art seems to indicate that art is pretty important and it’s all important if it shapes the world we live in. The mural in question reads like a hieroglyph. It’s a complicated junction of many different ideas, each image a trailhead for its own journey into a dark and bloody land, how we got here. Human slavery was part of that history but we don’t think that way anymore and that’s one of the things this mural makes explicit. Still art can be read different ways at different times by different people and this conversation is the way we eventually find commonality, and that’s this mural’s job. After all these years its purpose is finally revealed, but that six-sided irony aside, it’s a pretty nice painting. It’s a real work of art and not wallpaper, not school emblems or a trophy case, and compared with the other original works of art on campus it has something to say about raw intellect and depth of scholarship quite apart from what it literally says about our past.
Across campus at the entrance of the art museum stands the recently installed emoji mood totem, a stack of five plastic spheres depicting happy at the top in bright yellow and sad at the bottom in blue. Red is in the middle, maybe on top, who cares, it belongs on a playground and not for the older children. All students of every hue should be alarmed at the slippage. There was a ceremony for its placement with the president of the university and all, and that’s a cynical and mercenary betrayal of the whole notion of education, but I’m not going to do anything more about it than to compose this little sermon. Picturing them side by side the message is clear and until they destroy the mural, anyone can see it.
Changing the world by replacing the art seems to indicate that art is pretty important and it’s all important if it shapes the world we live in. The mural in question reads like a hieroglyph. It’s a complicated junction of many different ideas, each image a trailhead for its own journey into a dark and bloody land, how we got here. Human slavery was part of that history but we don’t think that way anymore and that’s one of the things this mural makes explicit. Still art can be read different ways at different times by different people and this conversation is the way we eventually find commonality, and that’s this mural’s job. After all these years its purpose is finally revealed, but that six-sided irony aside, it’s a pretty nice painting. It’s a real work of art and not wallpaper, not school emblems or a trophy case, and compared with the other original works of art on campus it has something to say about raw intellect and depth of scholarship quite apart from what it literally says about our past.
Across campus at the entrance of the art museum stands the recently installed emoji mood totem, a stack of five plastic spheres depicting happy at the top in bright yellow and sad at the bottom in blue. Red is in the middle, maybe on top, who cares, it belongs on a playground and not for the older children. All students of every hue should be alarmed at the slippage. There was a ceremony for its placement with the president of the university and all, and that’s a cynical and mercenary betrayal of the whole notion of education, but I’m not going to do anything more about it than to compose this little sermon. Picturing them side by side the message is clear and until they destroy the mural, anyone can see it.
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