Meredith Martin
Folk Art
Final Paper
12.3.2007

The Process and Skill of Envisioning:
The Kentucky Remembers! Mural Making Process in Paducah

In the summer of 2007 the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights began a pilot human rights education project called Kentucky Remembers! (exclamation point included). Working in partnership with the Kentucky Historical Society and Folklife Program, Community Scholars Program, and local artists, director Caitlin Swain along with a staff of college interns and volunteers conducted five youth human rights leadership camps across the state in the cities of Bowling Green, Paducah, Madison County/Berea, Louisville, and Covington. Throughout each town’s three week camp, delegates, as the students were called, learned about oral history, recorded interviews with local Civil Rights and human rights leaders in their area, took tours of their respective cities photographing their communities and meeting with citizens. In the third and final week of each of the camps, students partnered with a professional artist to create their own mural. Like so many murals around the world, the Kentucky Remembers murals intentionally draw from the political and social justice history of the art form, combining images, localized symbols, and words to depict a present community while also speaking to ideas about the future and what the community could and should be.

I was the camp staff oral historian for the Paducah camp and watched first hand the mural from start to finish. It is on this process that my research focuses. The Friday before our artist came, the students who had expressed an interest in designing the mural sat down for a group discussion. A student named Josh Chambers took the lead in the discussion and explained his ideas for a moving image, magic-realism style mural. He explained that the sky would be dark, almost dusk. All the members of the Paducah camp would come together in a circle and hold hands. When our fingers touched, the sky would light up and turn a beautiful orange color as if at dawn. Positive words like love, dignity, responsibility, and respect would come out of our brains and float up to the sky. The students in his group loved the idea and began to vocalize their own visions, suggesting images of white doves in the sky to represent peace both in the world and in their group. I took notes during our discussion and saved them for the next Monday when the artist was to come.

Gerald Pocius tells us in his article “Art” that our concepts of art are sometimes interchangeable with our concepts of folklore. That is, our ideas about art have become central to our foundational approach to understanding group culture. In fact, art, he suggests, can be seen to mean that which “represents a culture’s notion of excellence,” and in so doing “becomes central to the folklorist’s understanding of a particular group” ( 413). Other folklorists agree. Writing in the Works in Progress Newsletter about the landmark exhibit “Folk Arts of Social Change” Deborah Kodish calls folklore “another name for art” (2). And of course Ben-Amos says, and we folklorists often repeat, that folklore is “artistic communication in small groups.” Within the many facets of folklore studies, group culture and art are intrinsically intertwined. Drawing from Pocius’ ideas about art as excellence, we can see that the Paducah mural contains symbols depicting the students’ group consensus of what makes for an ideal community. The images provide a way of expressing and naming that which the students deem excellent in their culture as well as providing a platform to address that which needs to be changed. How they came to create and choose these symbols and words is best understood through art as a process rather than art as a product. By understanding art as a process we can also see art as a behavior rather than simply a tangible object.

That next Monday when the artist Ashley Cecil came, the students interviewed her about her work and then presented their initial ideas for the mural. The first two weeks of the Kentucky Remembers camp focused on interviewing and community mapping, and by this time some of the students were particularly skilled interviewers and were curious about why Ashley had chosen art as a career path and what her paintings were about. As the camp staff oral historian, I recorded the conversation, documenting the discussion as students began to bring up places they would like to be included in their mural while also explaining to Ashley the importance of these buildings.

One building they suggested that morning was the Metropolitan Hotel, the first African American hotel in the area, which is now being remodeled and soon to be open as an interactive museum. Like all of the images on the mural, this building symbolizes a large part of our camp experience. During our first week of camp we visited this hotel where owner Betty Dobson dressed up as the Hotel’s original proprietor Maggie Sneed to tell us the history of Paducah, especially the history of the African American neighborhood where the Hotel was located in what had once been a thriving community before the destructive effects of urban renewal. As Betty Dobson spoke, the students took pictures and recorded the interview with a Marantz recorder for our files. Later on we would use these same photos to trace the Metropolitan Hotel on to the mural.

Before their tour, the hotel was just another old building in a neighborhood full of old buildings. But after the tour it was a source of pride-- a place built by a young African American woman in a time when it was virtually unheard of for women to own hotels, much less an African American woman. Maggie Sneed was conceptuzlized as brave and ahead of her time, admirable characteristics for an activist working for positive social change. Later the hotel was home to the Purple Room, a club on the Chittlin Circuit where Cab Calloway and Ike and Tina Turner played. The museum also houses an extensive collection of Negro Baseball League artifacts, something that fascinated many of the young sports enthusiasts in the group. Furthermore, the hotel was a stopping place for many Civil Rights leaders including Thurgood Marshall. It was a place loaded with history and meaning, and it was soon to be open once again as a place to celebrate this history and meaning. That afternoon we got a sneak peak at what the renovated hotel would soon showcase to visitors. Betty Dobson spoke passionately to the delegates about becoming human rights leaders of the future and the importance of working hard to understand the complexities of history. After her talk and a tour of the hotel, she served us lemonade and cookies and answered the delegates many questions about Maggie Sneed, the historic African American neighborhood, and her own future plans for the Hotel.

The murals then are highly conscious visual productions of the experience and visions resulting, at least in part, to the students’ research in their community. Elements like the hotel are examples of what Jack Santino calls assemblage in that time and space are conflated: “Not only the content of the artifact but also its location, what other objects are in its proximity, and where they are placed vis a vis each other, are both aesthetic and political considerations” (50). The Hotel Metropolitan is a symbol of the past, rendered in the present, meant to affect the future and communicate with all who see it. It’s proximity to words like hope friendship, peace, trust, and dignity found in the clouds above the Metropolitan Hotel and other local buildings further ground the images as useful in the present.

These images are meant to remind both the students and the viewer that places carry stories and these stories remind us of the generations who have come before and worked to fight against racism and sexism and other social ills. In the mural’s visual language, the stories of the past are made useful in the present precisely because they have the capacity to affect the future. 

 

 

 

 

 

Art as Community Identity and Process: The P& M Survivors

From a folk art perspective, art is often seen as the product of group aesthetics. Henry Glassie notes in his article “Folk Art” that “it is only the rare folk artist who strives for innovation; his replication is an affirmation of a tradition” (259). Later in the same article under the heading “folk culture that is art,” Glassie notes that “the folk aesthetic can rarely be elicited directly; analysis of artifacts, behavioral observation, and ethnoscientifc questioning are the means for its determination” (268). Glassie suggests that there can be a fine line between culture and the objects produced by the culture. Decades later Pocius sums this up by saying “with this perspective, folklorists began to associate art not with a limited number of cultural items but rather with any type of everyday activity that required a certain amount of skill to execute” (423). The Paducah mural has no one artist, but was instead created as part of a group culture whose members saw themselves working within the mural’s tradition of social commentary. Their skill to execute this mural did not come from years of practice with a brush and oil pants. Instead, the impetus behind the mural was group research and observation. An examination of the process of the mural’s creation reveals the ideas and images for the mural entered into the group aesthetic subtly through the the act of daily life in the camps. This perspective of group aesthetics and behavior is particularly helpful in understanding how the mural was created and the meaning and symbol found within.

Our first large group discussion with the artist about what the mural should look like is loaded with the kind of language folklorists call “occupational lore.” That is, certain words or phrases carry with them both their literal meaning as well as an insider story. For example, the word “respect” kept coming up during that first brain storming session. It was a word with a rich history in the group.

A central element of the Kentucky Remembers camps, Paducah included, was the class discussions. From the beginning, students were given the space to be in charge of their own learning. For example, on the first day students were asked to set up their own rules for the camp as well as the consequences of breaking these rules. The students told us that what they wanted most was respect. We then talked about what respect was and how it feels to give and receive it. As these discussions were taking place, staff members or students themselves documented their insights on large pieces of paper and hung them to the wall so we could have visual reminders of our recent dialog. Words quickly took on a new life inside the camp’s group culture and carried the weight of our shared experience of working together. When communication broke down, as it often does in big group discussions,we had these visual reminders of those times we had managed to work past our differences and misunderstandings. These large pieces of paper became powerful signifiers for the difficult yet rewarding process of group dialog. It is no surprise that the word respect found its way into the mural. 

It should also be noted that the word respect was not something the students took lightly. Unlike many art programs, these students were chosen not based on grades, previous leadership skills, or artistic or creative talent. In fact, many of them were struggling in school or even failing. Some were troublemakers with a history of violence while others were honor roll students who never spoke in class and were lacking in social skills. In the Paducah camp, all of the delegates came from low-income neighborhoods where issues like transportation or even access to telephones was a constant hurdle to overcome. The delegates were recommended by community members who knew the students through after-school school programs and/or youth groups or they were recommended by concerned citizens who saw great unrecognized potential in these youth. Yet these young people came to the camps because they were recommended as students with potential for youth leadership, not because they were already leaders. Respect was not a word to be taken lightly. 

Another symbol in the mural that speaks directly to group culture is their logo, which reads: “The P and M Survivors: changing, building, leading with no limits. The Positive Change in the World.” This logo comes from the first week of camp when they were asked to come up with a group name for themselves. For the Paducah group it was particularly hard to reach a consensus because they were actually a group made up of students from two towns: Murray and Paducah. Forging a group name meant they each had to work past their preconceived ideas about what the residents in the other town were like. As staff members from all over the state we quickly learned that the Murray kids saw the Paducah kids as big city tough kids. The Paducah kids thought of the Murray kids as rural people with cows and no culture. Many class discussions centered around the many problems that arise when we judge people based on where they live. “P & M” was a way to combine their two identities; survivors refers to their role as people who will remain strong even as they face drug use, lack of money and opportunity and misunderstanding from their peers. They even came up with a slogan for themselves making their camp perhaps the wordiest group of the Kentucky Remembers camps. The fact that they wanted their logo to be at the center of the mural leading up to the rising sun speaks to a recognized potential they discovered over the course of the camp and the difficulties they worked through to forge this group unity. It was certainly not an easy path, and I would argue that their elaborate logo references the struggle and importance of this partnership.

From Envisioning to Canvas: the Question of Process and Skill

Although Josh’s idea about the dark clouds turning to dawn was loved by most of the delegates, in the end it proved too hard to transfer to canvas. It was the artist and her skill that helped the students realize this. As mentioned earlier, Pocius tells us that art is about everyday life and skill. I have said little about the artist, but no doubt her mark is on the painting itself. If you compare this mural, especially its use of color and heavy brush strokes with her other work, there are many similarities. A whole paper could be written on how her style came through on the canvas, but that is a topic for another paper. Skill is often thought of as the learned ability to execute certain movements that create an aesthetically pleasing object. Likewise, skill is a word that suggests refinement and dedication. In the case of the mural creation, two skill sets emerged: the literal skill of the professional artist and the skill of envisioning that came from the delegates. Although the students had the skill of envisioning and a deep group aesthetic, no one had any idea how to make a mural. So Ashley Cecil taught us some basics of technical skill involved in making a BIG painting.

To teach the students (and staff) the basics of mural making, the artist asked us to see the canvas in new ways. First students were asked to start thinking about how one draws on a large mural scale. For this exercise, the students were handed a large sheet of paper and asked to draw either the top, middle, or bottom section of a certain animal such as a pig, horse, or mouse. The students took great liberties with this exercise, adding their own personal touches. One student, a young gay man experimenting with gender identity and questioning gender stereotypes, was given the middle section of a mouse. He jokingly drew a mouse in a cocktail dress, drinking a martini headed to a club called “The Mouse Trap.” Another student was assigned the top half of an ant. In her drawing she called him Pablo, drew the creature a house, and concocted an elaborate story that defined Pablo the Ant’s personality. Once each of the students had completed their drawings we came back together as a group and put these drawings together to create the entire animal, which drew a great deal of laughter from both the students and the staff. 

The exercise was supposed to get the students thinking about how a mural is created. That is, each person works on a small scale, painting that which is front of them, but in working together a large picture can be created which expresses both a unified vision and individual styles. Like so many of our activities in Kentucky Remembers, this activity also became a kind of metaphor for community activism---that is, you can only work in your community doing that which is in front of you which can often feel so small and unimportant. But in working on a small scale we must remember that we are also working with others in both our own communities, and, in a sense, communities across the world. In working together and in utilizing open communication, we can bring about positive change that benefits the big picture, so to speak.

Next Ashley taught us something about the skill needed to take a visual image you see in front of you and render it onto paper. Staff members and delegates were asked to strike certain poses and students were asked to draw these poses, either as figures or stylized images. We quickly learned how difficult it can be to draw the human figure, and through this exercise students began to access some of their strengths and weaknesses as artists. Some students emerged particularly adept at “realistic” style images while others were particularly creative with more abstract styles. 

After all of these exercises were complete, students met together again to reevaluate their mural ideas. In these discussions the skill of envisioning and technical expertise merged. The delegates decided to keep the idea of the sun but decided to eliminate the idea about dusk. They kept the circle of people holding hands but decided they should be stylized, universal people rather than group portraits. Because no one stepped forward as someone comfortable with detailed drawing, the delegates decided to use photographs they had taken and trace the objects onto the canvas. Once this was complete, students began the discussion of how to mix colors.

Certainly there were problems in deciding what should be a part of the mural. Some students wanted to feature B.A. Hamilton, a man from Paducah who had given us a tour on the Trolley. Other students wanted a portrait of Oscar Cross, one of Paducah’s most well-known Civil Rights leaders. If we had more than one week to create the mural, perhaps more elaborate portraits and images would have been considered. However, we only had one week to both design and paint, and this time constraint played a substantial role in dictating what images made their way on to the canvas. In those early discussions, students would often remind one another, or even argue with one another, about those images that were deemed too difficult to render onto canvas. It was a delicate balance between envisioning and skill, and the conversations about the mural were not always peaceful. However, because the mural creation took place during the third week, the students had begun to learn the art of communicating with one another. With the help of the artist, they found images that fit their skill level, a compromise between their ideas and their skill with a paintbrush.

Painting and Process

Bill Westerman tells us in his article “Wild Grasses and Transformative Art: Potential in Applied and Public Folklore” that “a work of art inherently has the potential to transform. Yet this is an idea that is certain to make most folklorists uneasy, except in the most rare instances when we cease to be professionals and become cultural consumers” (118). In his own research with basket makers he found that language often fell short of explaining why basket makers found such joy and importance in their work. He says,

Usually the words break down, and people only speak in general terms” “It does something for me,” “I feel something,” and “I feel great.” We need to concentrate on that “something” in our research and activity. Whether psychological, aesthetic, emotional, or political, that “something” exists at a level where language does not reach” (416).

In speaking with the delegates, the professional artist, and the staff members who worked on the camps, stories about the painting process say little about the act of applying the paint to the canvas and more about the personal change they saw in some of the students or themselves. I would argue that what the staff members and delegates were discussing was this “something” that Westerman admits is highly important yet elusive. In the Paducah camp, two students in particular, Latia and Shauntara, worked closely on the mural.

Both of these students had been less excited about the oral histories and community mapping, but once on the mural committee they began to take ownership of the work, deeply connecting their own identity to the painting. They even took on painter names for themselves, an unintentional nod to the idea that painting is often understood as a form of fine art. Latia called herself Pierre; Shauntara dubbed herself Pasheesh. In a recorded interview with these two young women I asked why they loved working on the mural. Both spoke to the process of painting and the product created out of a process. Shauntara said it’s about “seeing what you have created.” Latia put it this way: “When it’s all said and done, you can stand there and say we did it” (Group interview, 2007). 

Likewise, during a recorded conversation with Kentucky Remembers staff and volunteers, stories were told about students from each of the camps and how through the mural process the students found a new skill and a new way of expressing themselves that seemed to the staff members as a kind of powerful transformation. Through the process of painting the students were, in a way, performing an idea of themselves onto the canvas, and, through assemblage, suggesting a new and improved identity for their community.

It became clear just how important the mural was to the group culture as the week drew to a close. As the mural was almost complete, the students gathered around to watch the final touches. Although we all had work to do and other group committees of which to be a part, we all congregated there in anticipation. 

Even those students who did little painting on the mural made a large production of signing their name to the bottom section of the painting. It was common knowledge that the mural was produced out of their group culture and encapsulated their group ideas for positive change. Ownership belonged to all. Because this ownership was collective, the mural also belonged to each of us individually. 

 

Paintings as Product

I have been talking about the murals as a process and a form of art linked to group identity, but I will close with a few ideas about the mural as a product that represents a process. Since the completion of the last camp in August of 2007 and the unveiling of the murals in September at the 2007 Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame Award Ceremony in Covington, the murals have become a kind of signifier for the camps, the one thing that we can point to in order to quickly explain to people what the camps were about. They have even begun to take on a form of monetary value in that director Caitlin Swain can showcase them to potential donors and say, ‘We did this kind of stuff. Please fund our future camps.’ She says after seeing the murals, donors are much more ready to give. As volunteer Walker Swain noted in our group interview:

I felt like the mural became a huge thing of what Kentucky Remembers was. Whenever I begin to tell people, it is one of the first things that you can show quickly and they get a sense of how incredible the experience must have been. Just from one glance at looking at them. Kids spent all this time doing the oral histories and those really gave them the foundation in a lot of ways. But it became culminating piece of what the whole project was about. (Swain 2007).

Even though the paintings have begun to take on a life of their own, touring the state for display until they find a permanent home, they were never really meant to be products that stood apart from the process. They are but one of many aspects of Kentucky Remembers including the documentation of Civil Rights stories in cities across Kentucky which will be compiled into a textbook, the student authored Declaration of Human Rights, the partnerships between Civil Rights leaders of the past, present, and future, and an upcoming interactive web-page containing the students’ research. The murals are meant to accompany these and other Kentucky Remembers products and thus help public schools teach the diverse history of human rights struggle in Kentucky. The fact that they have taken on such a life of their own was not completely intentional, but is certainly a welcome outcome. If nothing else, when people see the mural they become curious about how the mural was created which allows delegates and staff members to explain their experiences with Kentucky Remembers and its larger vision and goals.

In working with the Kentucky Remembers group since last summer, I have begun to learn that human rights education is rarely categorized and/ or compartmentalized in ways that mirror other forms of formal education. In human rights education theory, all education and artistic processes are conceived as circular. To explain further, in a recent paper given to the United Nations about the Kentucky Remembers project, director Caitlin Swain outlined the core principles of Kentucky Remembers as they developed in the process of completing the camps: “We believe that in any dialogue, teaching and learning move in both directions, with neither participant stuck in just one role. Learning should take place by everyone involved and teaching is expected of everyone involved.” Additionally Swain notes that “Human Rights Education is unapologetically ethical education. We explore history with the purpose of grappling with present needs and social problems” (Swain, 2007). In a phrase, all the processes of Kentucky Remembers were conceptualized as circular and multi-layered. While it is physically possible to separate the mural---the product--- from the process, something substantial, perhaps even necessary, is lost. Like all forms of art studied from the folk art perspective, the mural must be viewed as a part of a larger process. After all, it is this process, Westerman reminds us, that allows for the transformation art can bring.

The Process of Viewing – Unveiling the Mural

Unlike the murals Santino discusses in Ireland, or the WPA, Latino or inner city murals often described in scholarly writings, the Kentucky Remembers murals are not actually painted on buildings or tied to certain locations. They are portable. In fact, the unveiling of the Paducah mural took place at a public park as a part of our community celebration. It was transported there by truck. Although the mural’s unveiling was the visual highlight of the event, other activities took place such as an awards ceremony and games. One might argue that the Paducah mural is not even really a mural in the true sense of the word because it does not reclaim space in the same way murals on the sides of abandoned buildings do, for example. But it is considered a mural by the Kentucky Remembers group because it was created with that tradition of mural as political and human rights commentary in mind. The students are artists and, in a way tradition bearers, taking part in this aesthetic and walking that fine line that all artists walk between tradition and innovation.

Taken as a whole, the mural represents the process of the camp, yet it also represents a larger vision of a hoped-for equality in the larger world. Symbols abound in the mural. Not just the ones I have discussed in detail here, but many others as well. The people holding hands in a circle are painted in all colors, meant to represent all races and ethnicities. The houses are meant to represent a community where people live together in homes where all their basic housing needs including running water and heat are met. The sun is meant to represent new days, dawn, and growth. All the specific historic buildings in the painting are ones we visited during our tours of Paducah. Everything in the mural has a collective story.

Jack Santino tells us that images carry with them many symbols and their proximity to other symbols help to tell the story. Like many murals, this assemblage is meant to inspire emotion perhaps even suggest a call to action. Pocius suggests in his article about the nature of art and folk art studies that art is about moving beyond skill to emotion. He suggests that the ability to evoke emotion---in yourself or in others---is a skill in itself, a kind of artful behavior. I am reminded of Regina Bendix’s landmark folklore work In Search of Authenticity and her suggestion that in an age when folklore no longer recognizes concepts of authenticity in the same way as we did in the past, today authenticity is more an idea or emotion rather than a genre-esque check list of what makes something real or fake. Folklore and folk art, concepts that are fundamentally linked, rely heavily on the skill to bring forth emotion. The mural then, as studied from a folk art perspective of group aesthetics and process, represents a partnership between the skill of the artist and the students’ skill to envision. This skill to envision comes from a deep sense of group culture, making it almost impossible to separate the group culture from the product the group creates. The skill of envisioning speaks to process and has the potential, as Westerman suggests to be transformative for the artist and even those who view the artwork. Perhaps this is what Pocius was talking about when he said, art, as a kind of human behavior, may produce the kind of “cultural products” that “become involved in the exploration of the human soul” (426).