While playing with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland in 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot to death by two officers who arrived on the scene in response to a tip.
Within seconds of arriving, the officers drew down on Tamir Rice and shot him, even though he posed no danger to them or anyone else. The officers said they feared for their lives and for public safety. They were eventually exonerated for the shooting that is now classified as justified.
Unlike many who were merely troubled by the injustice swirling around the shooting of Tamir Rice, artist Tom Megalis was outraged enough to do something about it.
The Carnegie Mellon University graduate, who now lives in Cleveland, distilled his pain and outrage into a powerful, graphic painting called “Within 2 Seconds, the Shooting of Tamir Rice.”
Mr. Megalis’ painting was accepted into this year’s Juried Visual Art Exhibition sponsored by the 2017 Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. It is rendered in a style both reminiscent of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work and Pablo Picasso’s cubist-African mask period.
Despite the grimness of the subject matter, Mr. Megalis was justifiably proud of the work and posted the image on social media. Immediately, a discussion swirled online around the painting and whether it came from a place of pain and authenticity or cultural appropriation and exploitation. Because Mr. Megalis is white, that created a layer of unfair and illogical suspicion.
Shaken by the vitriol that accompanied much of the discussion, Mr. Megalis believed it would be the better part of valor to withdraw the painting from the exhibit since so many people believe a white artist is disqualified from painting about such subjects because it “exploits black pain.” The festival didn’t have strong feelings about it one way or the other and encouraged him to follow his conscience.
The festival missed an opportunity to stand up for the primacy of art over emotional over-reaction.
Mr. Megalis would have done the public a greater good if he had stuck to his guns and allowed the painting to be exhibited. It would have been a teachable moment about the power of art. It would have forced the skeptics to provide actual reasons that weren’t racist in themselves about why artists expressing outrage against police violence have to do so from pre-approved, color-coded boxes.
If the rule now is that only black artists can express black pain, then there are whole swaths of human experience that artists from different racial backgrounds would be unable to express.
A musical like “Hamilton,” staged by Puerto Rican and African-American actors about the nation’s all-white Founding Fathers, wouldn’t be possible under such an oppressive scenario. Bob Dylan couldn’t have sung his early classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind” or other songs that critiqued segregation if being black was a prerequisite for speaking out against injustice.
Mr. Megalis’ critics are most likely social activists with little understanding or stomach for art that is truly transgressive. Asking an artist to show his or her “racial papers” before allowing them to express themselves is little more than aesthetic apartheid. It will lead to a poverty of expression, which is the opposite of what art is supposed to do. Art is about empathy more than it is about skin color.
First Published: May 30, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
