\u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about Freddie Gray,\u201d Locke says. Gray was arrested by Baltimore police in April 2015, put in a police van and driven away. The African American man somehow came out the other side with injuries that killed him. Police faced charges in Gray\u2019s death, but none of the trials have resulted in convictions. That terrible story has stuck in Locke\u2019s mind, as well as the resonance of Gray\u2019s name\u2014the name of a color that seemed symbolic somehow of the centuries-old conflict between whites and people of color in this country.<\/p>\n After Locke had an artist residency at the Gardner Museum, contemporary art curator Pieranna Cavalchini invited him to do a public art project there. Locke says, \u201cI found a whole bunch of photos of Freddie Gray, then I picked out three that I was most interested in\u201d\u2014Gray looking directly at the camera on a street corner in his neighborhood, Gray arrested by police and \u201chis leg is broken and you can clearly see it,\u201d Gray in the hospital on life support.<\/p>\n Locke digitally averaged the colors of each photo, then hand-mixed paint of those three hues. He took his swatches to a paint store to get cans of the colors made up. He used those to paint three separate panels, an abstract composition of stripes. (That now hangs in the Gardner director\u2019s office, Locke says. \u201cI gave it to them.\u201d) Then a printer matched his painting to create a giant banner to hang on the outside of the Gardner Museum.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a big believer in not looking away,\u201d Locke says. \u201cYou can\u2019t turn away from that stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n The banner is one of a number of Locke projects attracting attention this summer. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has been complimentary of a proposal Locke recently floated for a Boston \u201cAuction 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.\u201d<\/a> Locke would install a 10-foot by 16-foot bronze plate at ground level with \u201craised text and image of the routes and supplies of the Triangular Trade.\u201d He plans to keep the bronze heated at 98.6 degrees \u201cto evoke the presence of those Africans and African-Americans who came into chattel slavery through Boston. \u2026 This will make touching the work an intimate and reverent experience as if you are touching a living person.\u201d<\/p>\n And early in July, Locke, as a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence, launched \u201cLove Letter to a Library,\u201d<\/a> with banners reading “I Remember Everything You Taught Me Here\u201d hung outside the Copley Square entrance to the Boston Public Library\u2019s Central Library. It will be on view there through October. The project will also include displays throughout the library system throughout the summer and early fall.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the time I came to Boston back in 1980,\u201d Locke has said, \u201cthe library, particularly the McKim Building, was a place of discovery, refuge, and solace. There, I learned about Sargent, met Andy Warhol, fell in love, and mourned loved ones. As I moved to various Boston neighborhoods, the branch libraries have allowed me to learn about my community and about myself as an artist and as a citizen. This project is my way of saying \u2018thank you\u2019\u2014to the library and its people for what they do for people like me every day.\u201d<\/p>\n These projects reflect a shift that Locke seems to have made between his major 2013 solo exhibit “there is no one left to blame\u201d <\/a>at Boston\u2019s Institute of Contemporary Art and his 2016 piece \u201cA Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed By Police or Who Died in Police Custody During My Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n For his ICA show, Locke exhibited roughly rendered painted portraits of guys\u2014their bodies, their faces, often sticking out their tongues. Many of the paintings were mounted atop vertical pipes. At the time, Locke said war and terrorism, masculinity and gay life, prejudice against African Americans and women were among the topics on his mind.<\/p>\n \u201cI was thinking about my own place in the world now that everyone I knew is gone,\u201d Locke told me recently. \u201cThe AIDS epidemic destroyed everyone I knew. My parents are gone. I was surrounded by ghosts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA Partial List\u2026\u201d was a roster names and dates and reported causes of death listed on a wall of the Boston Center of the Arts in the 2017 exhibit \u201cI Dread to Think\u2026\u201d \u201cThis is just what\u2019s in the world right now,\u201d Locke says. \u201cI\u2019m just responding to what\u2019s in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Locke\u2019s shift has corresponded to rise of smart phones, which have increasingly allowed people to record and share video of beatings and murders of African-Americans across the country. Killings perpetrated by police and others. The violence is not a new phenomenon, but the video documentation of it and ease of widespread sharing of those recordings by social media and news reporters is new. This has brought the systemic violence against black Americans to the attention of many more white Americans, made the violence more inescapable for Americans of color, and sparked activism like Black Lives Matter.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not new at all. It\u2019s always been known,\u201d Locke says. \u201cCops have one job: to beat up poor people or beat up black people. \u2026 They\u2019re to protect property. They\u2019re not there to protect people. \u2026 Police have been killing people for a long time, but now we have technology that shows it. And people still don\u2019t believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI never really made inscrutably personal abstract work. My work has been through portraiture,\u201d Locke says. \u201cI think the thing that\u2019s different is that inward look is now reflected through other kinds of media, which is more legible to people.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2016, he presented simultaneous exhibitions at two commercial galleries on Harrison Avenue in Boston: \u201cFamily Pictures\u201d at Gallery Kayafas (historical images of lynchings and slave ships) and \u201cThe School of Love\u201d at Samson (a series of portrait paintings and plaster heads\u2014meant to represent his own\u2014suspended by ropes and hooks and studded with nails).<\/p>\n \u201cMy work has always been about the dealing of power, who has it, who gets to keep it and how pictures support it,\u201d Locke says.<\/p>\n For a about a year now, since his work on \u201cFreddie Gray,\u201d Locke has been making a series of drawings called \u201cKillers,\u201d portraying \u201cpeople who have murdered black people. Most of them are white. There\u2019s an Asian person, a police officer in New York. It\u2019s also vigilanties, people like Dylann Roof,\u201d who murdered nine people in a South Carolina church in 2015. Locke draws them from photographs circulated in news reports and online.<\/p>\n \u201cI try to make a beautiful drawing of a horrible person. That\u2019s just hard. It\u2019s really, really hard,\u201d Locke says. \u201cI think there\u2019s something radical about that act of empathy, to make them as beautiful and human as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re floating in this whiteness, this aggressive white support of the paper,\u201d Locke says. \u201cIt\u2019s about the amount of whiteness that supports the process. \u2026 How did Dylann Roof happen?\u201d<\/p>\n Other \u201cKillers\u201d he\u2019s drawn include the murderers of James Byrd in Texas in 1998 and police officer Darren Wilson who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.<\/p>\n \u201cSpending a lot of time with killers is difficult,\u201d Locke says. \u201cThe more I do it, the more difficult it becomes. So I think I might be getting to the end of the project.\u201d<\/p>\n Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Late last month, Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum installed a new public artwork, a giant banner hanging down the facade of its building by Boston artist Steve Locke. It\u2019s titled \u201cThree Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray)\u201d and consists of three bars of color\u2014red, brown, gray. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about Freddie Gray,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,100,105],"tags":[223,414,415,416,215,96,87,417,413],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8173"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8183,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8173\/revisions\/8183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Steve](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/picSteveLockeGardner180628w-1024x980.jpg\")
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