In April 2015, Freddie Gray was arrested by Baltimore police and badly injured during transport. The 25-year-old African American man died a week later. Six officers were charged with crimes ranging from illegal arrest to second-degree “depraved-heart” murder. None were convicted.
The following year, artist Steve Locke secured a fellowship at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where he was invited to create a large-scale mural. Freddie Gray was on his mind.
Locke determined to make a memorial.
The project inspired Locke to think hard about the purpose and use of public monuments. He will share his insights at the Sottile Theatre on Nov. 3 when he delivers a talk titled “Memory in the Built Form.” Locke is this year’s featured artist in the Gibbes Museum’s annual Distinguished Lecture Series.
For the Gardner Museum, he created a large abstract piece mounted on an exterior wall of the museum building. The artist selected three photographs of Gray that had appeared in the media: one of the man on a street corner, another being arrested and another when he was on life support in the hospital.
He averaged the pixels of each image to create monochromes then made a fabric print that represented a kind of timeline: life, suffering, death.
“Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray)” was a new kind of public monument, a response not only to the treatment of Gray at the hands of the police, but to the repeated scenes of brutality, broadcast on television, that he has been forced to endure.
“It’s very upsetting to be a Black person and see this over and over again,” he said.
Monuments have a function quite different from that of public art, he said. They are not really meant to decorate the environment, but rather to help us remember certain figures or events. When they are installed is key.
Take, for example, the majority of Confederate monuments, which were erected during the decades when white supremacy was reasserted after the Reconstruction period, and again in response to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
Their purpose, evident by the timing, was to intimidate Black people, Locke said. The public debate over these monuments indicate that a growing number of Americans “are starting to be unhappy about the lie,” he said. “Those lies are getting people killed.”
Locke is proposing other monuments meant to correct omissions and distortions. One is a large footprint of a slave auction block that would be embedded in the pavement of Boston’s Faneuil Hall, the site of public meetings and protests that date back to the Revolutionary War. The building was named for Peter Faneuil, the son of French Huguenots and a merchant who gained enormous wealth partly because of his involvement in the slave trade.
Locke wants his slave auction block to be heated to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the normal temperature of a human being. He wants to create a time capsule.
“The notion is that when you are in that spot, you are transported to the past,” he said. “It makes history immediate.”
The project has not yet been approved.
