'The history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.'
Toni Morrison
In bleak, block letters - white words on a black flag - the message was blunt: "A man was lynched yesterday."
Artist Steve Locke was in Ms. McRae's fourth grade class in Detroit when he first saw that banner and learned about the NAACP. It was 1972 or '73, and she taught him about how they used this flag between 1920 and 1938, how they used the law, and used solidarity to fight for the rights of people of color.
"It was amazing to me," Locke said. "They used the truth."
Locke's mother was a member of the NAACP. His sister is a member of the NAACP. It's America's oldest civil rights organization, founded in 1909, and it has been a constant in his life, and in most Black American lives.
That anti-lynching flag was a visual statement, flying high, raising awareness of the brutal injustice against Black people.
A century later, Locke’s concept for “Auction Block Memorial at Faneuil Hall” could have harnessed that same declarative power. It would have forced Boston to recognize its role in slavery. This work could have been to Boston what “Rumors of War,” the anti-Confederate memorial by Kehinde Wiley, is in Richmond — a corrective, a reckoning, a healing.
But last July, a week before a public hearing on Locke’s design, the local NAACP took a stand against his work.
“Auction Block” was meant to live outside of Faneuil Hall, the alleged Cradle of Liberty, named after slave trader Peter Faneuil.
It was meant to carry on Locke’s tradition of holding space in Boston. Those truth-telling lessons he learned in fourth grade are his foundation. You see it in his first big museum show at the ICA in 2013, “there is no one left to blame," that explored vulnerability, violence, and masculinity. It was in the tender simplicity of “I Remember Everything You Taught Me Here” banners that flew outside of the Boston Public Library in 2018. He shaded it in the subtle poetry of “Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray)” displayed on the facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from June 2018 to January 2019.
And now, we may never see Locke’s most important work in Boston. This weekend, he is slated to speak about “Auction Block” at an art convening in Los Angeles. His project continues to spark a flame through the art world.
How did we get here?
In 2018, Locke was chosen to take part in Boston AIR, the city’s artist-in-residence program. Through the mayor’s office of Arts and Culture, AIR allows artists to use art and media to bolster city initiatives. The city doesn’t assign projects. But there are motifs.
During Locke’s residency, the theme examined city policies through the lens of resilience and racial equity. His research on slavery and New England led him to propose “Auction Block Memorial at Faneuil Hall: A Site Dedicated to Those Enslaved Africans and African-Americans Whose Kidnapping and Sale Here Took Place and Whose Labor and Trafficking Through the Triangular Trade Financed the Building of Faneuil Hall.”
The bronze plate was meant to be set into the ground, street level, a truth to stand on. It was meant to be 10-by-16 feet and heated to a steady 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Inspired by Horst Hoheisel’s “A Memorial to a Memorial” in Buchenwald, Germany, which is also heated to body temperature to remind people of the victims of the Nazi concentration camp, Locke aimed to keep alive the memories of enslaved people here in Boston.
The plate was to contain a map of the Triangular Trade route, the path to wealth of the Faneuil family and other Bostonians. Humans were sold on Merchant’s Row. Peter Faneuil was a slave holder and a human trafficker. We could change the name of the Hall. Or we could move right on. But what Locke wanted was a marker, an acknowledgment of what happened here.
Mayor Marty Walsh supported his project. AIR loved the idea. The city contributed $150,000 from its arts fund to it. Locke raised just over $48,000 through Kickstarter.
“I thought Steve’s proposal was thoughtful and an important telling of a history that must have more visibility,” Walsh told the Globe last July. “I was hopeful that a public process would have allowed Steve to provide that context.”
There was some opposition, too. The nonprofit New Democracy Coalition, in a longstanding quest to change the name of Faneuil Hall, showed disfavor from the start. They claimed it was a way for the mayor to thwart renaming efforts.
But the most powerful voice against Locke’s work came, surprisingly, from the local chapter of the NAACP. No one from the chapter met with the artist to ask about his work. Instead, he got an e-mail.
“I want to be clear that the work we do every day through the NAACP Boston Branch is centered on uplifting and advancing communities of color, with a focus on the Black community in the city of Boston,” Tanisha Sullivan, Boston NAACP president, wrote to Locke. “It is for that reason that we object to the installation of a slave auction block memorial in front of Faneuil Hall and have made these objections known.”
Sullivan told me they didn’t stand against Locke’s work. They objected to the process.
“There was never a public space,” she said. “For any type of memorial that proposes to bring about hope and reconciliation as it relates to race and the racial trauma, I think the Black community is owed the respect of having the opportunity to weigh in. That’s not about the NAACP. That is about the community as a whole.”
Locke never wanted to avoid a public process.
In fact, Karin Goodfellow, director of the Boston Art Commission and Boston AIR, said Locke pushed for such a process. In December, the city changed their policies and refined the public art process, in part because of recommendations from Locke.
Goodfellow said Locke was pushing for progress and the public hearing was meant to facilitate a civic conversation.
But Locke knew putting his work between the NAACP and the city was going to turn into a war that would only distract from the work. And who really wants to fight with the NAACP?
So he withdrew.
He’d already accepted a job at the Pratt Institute and was in the middle of a move to New York. But the whole ordeal sent him packing sooner, leaving the city he called home, the place he built his art career. I didn’t blame him.
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Read full article at bostonglobe.com.
