Adrienne Elise Tarver’s art explores perceptions of Black women

By Taylor Mendoza | Photos by Stephanie Eley

In Adrienne Elise Tarver’s Three Graces, a trio of women stand together in naked repose. Surrounded by sugarcane and banana and pineapple trees, they lean into each other: hands gripping hands, arms and heads resting on shoulders. It’s a seemingly peaceful scene—but the inspiration for the painting is mired in racism. Three Graces is based on a photo Tarver (’07) found online showing Black women who were exhibited in Europe in the 19th or early 20th century. In Tarver’s painting, the women’s expressions are solemn and shadows of palm fronds slash across their shoulders and faces, reminiscent of the bars of a cage; the foliage covers turquoise boxy forms, suggesting a constructed background.

Three Graces (2019) Oil on canvas 84 x 72 in. The painting is based on a photo Tarver found online showing Black women who were exhibited in Europe in the 19th or early 20th century. Adrienne Tarver

“There were human zoos all around Europe and America throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Tarver, an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been shown across the world and lauded by publications like the New York Times and Brooklyn Magazine. “We understand how wrong that situation is and how exploitative it is, and yet the way the women were posed, it reminded me of so many images I had seen through my entire education, which had been sculpted and painted by mostly European men.”

Tarver was particularly reminded of postimpressionist Paul Gauguin’s exoticized and idealized depictions of French Polynesia and the women who lived there. She says the trope of the sexualized tropical seductress is one that has influenced the perception of modern Black women and that she has explored in much of her art.

“My work for the past five years has really been about Black female identity within the Western landscape,” she says. For Tarver, Black femininity of the past and present are inseparable. “I was thinking about the dualities of how we have been made to exist within this context, from this domestic, silenced figure who’s supposed to fade into the background to this oversexualized tropical seductress on display, and figuring out the narrative to give women in these spaces more agency.”

Escape

Three Graces debuted in January 2020 in Escape, an exhibition of Tarver’s work at Victori + Mo, a contemporary art gallery in New York City. The exhibit showed how the history of colonialism continues to impact Black women, showing lush tropical landscapes, vacation photos, and cruise ads, as well as images of human suffering and exploitation.

Escape the Crowds (2019) Cut paper collage. In collages like this one, Tarver subverts imagery from the tourism industry, calling attention to its roots in slavery and colonialism. Adrienne Tarver

“I was thinking about the duality of the word ‘escape,’” says Tarver, who centered the exhibition on the tourism industry and its roots in slavery and colonialism. “Sandals resorts and all of these vacation places, they all use ‘escape’ in their ads. The idea that you’re escaping your normal life, you get to go visit this place for a moment and forget everything. It just felt so ironic, because, ultimately, these places were built upon slave labor. The people who were creating these seductive landscapes that everyone is trying to escape to would have loved to escape to freedom.”

Escape also included a projected installation of tropical vacation photographs from the ’60s and ’70s. Tarver says she wanted to play with the feelings of nostalgia the photos provoked.

“It’s easy to fall into the warm, fuzzy feeling of memory with that, and as you walk down this narrow hallway, there are these collages juxtaposing ads for cruise ships and resorts with historical imagery of plantation workers, domestic help, and slave ships, so it’s clear that this more lighthearted thing is not as it seems.”

Head Above Water (2018) Oil on canvas 84 x 72 in. New York Times art critic Jillian Steinhauer wrote that the painting first connoted “glamorous freedom,” but after seeing works like Three Graces, “instead of seeing a scene of luxury, I imagined one of the women swimming to freedom.” Adrienne Tarver

The first painting viewers saw as they entered Escape was Head Above Water, which shows a woman’s legs dangling as she floats in sunlit water. Her crisp white bathing suit bottom contrasts with her brown legs. In her review of the show, New York Times art critic Jillian Steinhauer said when she first saw the painting, it suggested “glamorous freedom,” but after seeing the slideshow and works like Three Graces, “instead of seeing a scene of luxury, I imagined one of the women swimming to freedom.”

Art and Identity

Photography has long been an important part of Tarver’s art. While Three Graces was influenced by a photograph she found online, much of her earlier work was inspired by family photos—in particular those of her older brother. He died when she was 16.

“I painted a lot of photos of him, of him and me, of my family,” she says. “I went to a summer program at the Art Institute of Chicago and made this series of 16 small paintings all arranged together of different parts of my brother’s life.”

Tarver teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus, where she is the associate chair of fine arts.

Although Tarver had initially thought of architectural design as a potential outlet for her creativity, her brother’s death prompted a fresh look at her plans. “I was really understanding how short life is,” she says. “I really don’t know if I would have pursued art if that hadn’t have happened.”

“It’s not possible to separate my experience as a Black woman from my art, because so much of my art is about my experience.”

At CFA, Tarver shifted away from portraits of her family—“I couldn’t separate how people talked about the art from what I felt about my family”—and began to use her art to explore what it meant to be Black and female in America.

“I got a bunch of old silver platters and silver serving things and I started doing a lot of self-portraits. I balanced the tray on my head with the objects, taking on this character of a house servant. I was diving into this history of who I was to America—the domestic woman.”

Now an associate chair of fine arts at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Ga., Tarver says her identity as a Black woman continues to be essential to her work. “It’s not possible to separate my experience as a Black woman from my art,” she says, “because so much of my art is about my experience.”

Projecting Futures

Escape closed on March 14, 2020, around when New York placed coronavirus-related restrictions on its residents. While Tarver had some downtime in the wake of her exhibit closing, the uncertainty of coronavirus and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protests have inspired her to explore the ideas present in the exhibition, as well as what the future means to Black people.

“The longer we were in this situation, the more unknown it became, I thought a lot about fortune-telling and tarot,” says Tarver, who began studying the stories of—and attitudes toward—Black women like famed New Orleans Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau and TV psychic Miss Cleo. “There’s this idea of the Black woman holding some sort of deep wisdom or mythology, so there’s always a separation between this world and their world. In a moment where there’s so much uncertainty, I think people fall back to religion or astrology, just because nobody else can tell them real answers.”

This summer, Tarver started making her own tarot cards. Using ink, oil pastel, and colored pencil, she created a series of vibrantly colored images inspired by Afrofuturist ideas and imagery of the tropics. The titles of the works share the names of cards typically found in a tarot deck, such as High Priestess and Chariot. In Strength, a woman sits perched on an elephant’s trunk. Both woman and elephant are painted in washy ink, starkly contrasting with the bold yellow sky behind them and the bright blue ground beneath them, which is thickly built up with pastel. Tarver will eventually make these images into a printed deck of cards.

“It was this understanding that saying that we exist in the future—that there’s a future for Black people—is actually a radical statement,” says Tarver. “This idea of projecting futures, of telling fortunes, is a radical idea in and of itself, and telling somebody that you will exist tomorrow is a really heavy statement when you are consumed with how unpredictable life can be.”

Good cop, bad cop, superhero. Michael Chiklis discusses how he reinvented himself to stay on top in a fickle business and dishes on his new show, Coyote

By Mara Sassoon | Photo by Patrick Strattner

Michael Chiklis
(’85) earned critical acclaim for his role on The Shield, for which he won a 2002 Emmy and a 2003 Golden Globe.  Reed Saxon/AP (top); Kevork Djansezian/AP (bottom)

In the 2002 pilot episode of the hit FX series The Shield, the show’s merciless and corrupt protagonist, Los Angeles Police Department detective Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, brutally beats a suspect and murders a fellow officer in cold blood—and it only gets worse from there. For the rest of the show’s seven seasons, Mackey displays increasingly disturbing and illegal behavior: torturing and killing suspects, stealing evidence, embezzling money. Not only did the events of that first episode make it onto Rolling Stone’s “The Shocking 16: TV’s Most Heart-stopping Moments,” but Entertainment Weekly also named Mackey one of its “16 Ultimate TV Antiheroes.”

It’s a role Chiklis (’85) played with compelling, can’t-look-away grit and one that earned him critical acclaim—he won a 2002 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and a 2003 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama. And he’s bringing a similar captivating performance to his starring role in the upcoming series Coyote. But before he got to the A-list, Chiklis had plenty of time out of the limelight, working in a host of small theaters, waiting a lot of tables, and even starring in a movie so controversial he thought he’d never act again.

The Acting Bug

“My parents used to tell me that I announced when I was five years old that I was going to be an actor,” Chiklis says. Growing up in Andover, Mass., he recalls watching The ABC Comedy Hour, which featured a group of comedic impressionists called The Kopykats that included the actors Frank Gorshin and Rich Little. Chiklis would walk around “imitating those two guys imitating other people” and make people laugh. “I think it was that response that made me feel like acting was my calling.”

That calling became a little more real during the ninth grade, when Chiklis starred as Hawkeye Pierce in his school’s stage production of M*A*S*H. “It was pretty racy for a high school play,” he says. His turn as the chief surgeon caught the attention of a casting director from a local summer stock theater, landing him a spot in a production of Bye Bye Birdie. The production’s director, Mark Kaufman, would become Chiklis’ first theatrical mentor. When Kaufman cofounded the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, he cast Chiklis in a production of Romeo and Juliet during its first season.

“I gained incredible insight from watching Mark open a regional theater, from inception to fruition,” Chiklis says. “Seeing that process and getting to be onstage so much, it solidified my love for the theater and acting.” Kaufman also encouraged him to apply to Boston University’s theater program. It was the only school Chiklis applied to. “Now, I think to myself, ‘Oh my God, what if I didn’t get in?’ I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Chiklis at a rehearsal for a 1984 BU mainstage production of The Hostage. Rehearsals, he says, “were where I learned the most.” BU Photography

Chiklis attributes much of his success to the guidance he had as a young actor from people like Kaufman and—at CFA—the late Jim Spruill, who was an associate professor of theater. “Good mentorship can completely change the outcome in a person’s life,” Chiklis says. That kind of mentorship, he believes, extends far beyond acting advice. During his freshman year, he was blindsided by the news that his parents were divorcing. “My family broke. It really cracked my foundation and sent me into a kind of a spiral.” His grades and performances started to suffer and Spruill took notice. “He knew I was a good student, that I loved the craft. But all of a sudden, I was aimless and unfocused. He cared enough to say, ‘What’s up with you? What’s happening?’ He nurtured me through it. He cared enough to just ask a couple of questions.”

While Chiklis fondly recalls performing in shows like On the Razzle at the Huntington Theatre Company, which BU had established during his freshman year, he loved the rehearsals more than anything. “They were where I learned the most. At rehearsals, we were exchanging ideas—students from all over the country, from every race, creed, and walk of life. The truth is, we would go at it. Everyone was super opinionated and we discussed and argued about the shows.

“BU just opened my mind to so many things, so many people. It made me think, ‘Wow, there’s just so much to know.’”

Breaking Through

As graduation loomed, Chiklis envisioned himself heading to New York and getting a big break on Broadway. He moved to the city two days after graduating, ready to make headlines.

“I commend the School of Theatre for all the things I learned in terms of the craft and how to be the best actor that I could be. But what was lacking at the time was learning the vocational side of it—the business of show business,” he says. “That’s why I love coming back to BU and speaking to students, because I feel like I was that wide-eyed kid five minutes ago thinking, ‘Please give me some insight.’”

Chiklis spoke at the 2018 CFA Convocation. “Music, art, theater, dance, film, all of these art forms make the world a far better place,” he told the graduates. “Can you imagine our world without them?” Video by BU Productions

“I love coming back to BU and speaking to students, because I feel like I was that wide-eyed kid five minutes ago thinking, ‘Please give me some insight.’”

Michael Chiklis

When Chiklis arrived in New York, Broadway was in a slump. “There were only maybe eight theaters lit,” he says. “It was all musicals and they were mostly revivals. There were almost no original musicals happening at that time.” He found some small off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway gigs, and did a few performances at La MaMa, the experimental theater group in the East Village. But he was mostly biding his time, waiting tables and bartending to make a living, and hoping that something big would come along soon. It would take two years.

Chiklis was working as a waiter at a West Village restaurant called Formerly Joe’s, alongside the late chef Anthony Bourdain and an up-and-coming Edie Falco. One day, his agent called the restaurant’s phone—Falco was the one who picked up: Chiklis had gotten a break. While he was still at BU, a casting director for a forthcoming film adaptation of Bob Woodward’s John Belushi biography Wired had spotted Chiklis in the senior theater showcase in New York City at Lincoln Center and offered him an audition for the role of Belushi. It took more than 12 auditions over the course of two years to finally get the role.

Things were looking up.

Reinvention

Until they weren’t.

Woodward’s book had reaped its fair share of controversy when it was released, with Belushi’s friend and Saturday Night Live costar Dan Aykroyd claiming it misquoted him and misrepresented Belushi. When the film adaptation was announced, there were plenty of vocal opponents: Chiklis has long maintained that at least one of them warned casting directors not to hire anyone from the movie. Wired’s coproducer Edward Feldman told Time magazine months before the film was released that “word was put out that this was a project not to be touched.”

“Here it is, I got a huge break playing an icon in a big feature film with an Academy Award–winning producer. It was a completely exciting, life-changing moment,” says Chiklis. “And then, by the time I’m not even finished filming the movie, I find out that I’m going to be blacklisted from making movies. My career seemed like it was over.”

For a little more than a year, Chiklis says, he was snubbed: “I couldn’t get seen for anything,” he says. “It was a horrible, fretful time.”

When the film eventually appeared on screens, Chiklis says it was “cut to pieces to avoid the onslaught of lawsuits pending against it.” The movie was panned. Moviegoers walked out of the 1989 Cannes Film Festival premiere.

"I did what I had to do to change minds,” Chiklis says. “It’s a very fickle industry. Listen to the lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s song ‘That’s Life’: ‘Riding high in April, shot down in May.’ That is exactly the life of an actor.” Patrick Strattner

Chiklis returned to New York and played some small parts in stage productions while trying out for guest roles in popular television series. Finally, the television doors opened when the late Burt Reynolds advocated for him to get a part in an episode of his show B.L. Stryker. A cameraman who had worked on Wired was now working on B.L. Stryker and arranged for Chiklis to meet with Reynolds. In a 2015 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Chiklis says Reynolds told him he “didn’t believe in blackballing and thought I was a great talent, and he wanted to hire me, so he did.” Guest starring roles in some of the biggest shows of the time, like Murphy Brown, L.A. Law, and Seinfeld, followed. Networks were even considering him for his own show.

In 1991, he landed the starring role in The Commish, in which he played Tony Scali, the affable police commissioner of a small town in New York. He was encouraged to gain weight for the role; although he was in his late 20s when the show started filming, he was playing someone more than a decade older. The show ran for a successful five seasons, but Chiklis felt stuck, pigeonholed by the part. “Everybody thought that I was a 50-year-old, roly-poly nice guy.”

At his wife’s encouragement, Chiklis shaved his thinning hair and hit the gym, ready to reinvent himself. “At this point, no one would have hired me to play Vic Mackey. I did what I had to do to change minds,” he says. “It’s a very fickle industry. Listen to the lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s song ‘That’s Life’: ‘Riding high in April, shot down in May.’ That is exactly the life of an actor.”

Striking Gold

In 2019, the Guardian reminisced about The Shield, writing, “If you talk about the golden age of TV without mentioning The Shield, you’re doing it wrong.” The newspaper lauded the show for maintaining its quality all the way through its last episode and not petering out with a disappointing final season like other programs have. It praised Chiklis’ “magnificent performance” of a character who, despite his amoral deeds, still garners sympathy. Playing Mackey, which has arguably become Chiklis’ best-known role to date, was “an amazing, life-changing experience,” he says.

“We knew we were doing something special. It was artistically just such an incredible time. The show felt very relevant. It still feels so relevant because a question we were asking at the time through the show was, ‘What are we willing to accept from law enforcement in post–9/11 America to keep us safe?’ And, as it turns out, a lot of us were willing to accept way too much.”

Chiklis, a lifelong comic book fan, played The Thing in Fantastic Four and its sequel. 20th Century Fox

His turn as Mackey opened up other parts, like Ben Grimm/The Thing in Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (passion projects for Chiklis, a lifelong comic book fan) and more recent roles in American Horror Story: Freak Show and Gotham.

Soon, Chiklis will bring a Mackey-esque tough-guy edge to his starring role in the upcoming series Coyote, set to premiere on an as-yet undisclosed streaming service in early 2021. He plays Ben Clemens, a longtime US Border Patrol agent who, on the same day of his mandatory retirement, finds a tunnel used for smuggling black market goods into the United States from Mexico. Through a series of events, he becomes a coyote, someone who smuggles people across the border. Chiklis, who also serves as a coexecutive producer on the series, worked with the show’s director and executive producer Michelle MacLaren for more than two years to polish the series and get it ready for development.

In the upcoming Coyote, Chiklis plays US Border Patrol agent Ben Clemens. Like many shows and movies in 2020, Coyote's premiere was pushed to 2021, but Chiklis says it is worth the wait. Video courtesy Rotten Tomatoes TV

“This show is about a collision of cultures. It’s very timely, but the show is not political,” says Chiklis. Half of the show’s writing staff, he says, are South and Central American and Mexican, while the other half are from the United States. He is drawn to playing the complex Clemens, a character whose “viewpoint has been galvanized through echo chambers. But he starts questioning his views. It’s very disillusioning for him and very disorienting.”

Filming for the show started in November 2019, mostly around Baja California, Mexico, and Chiklis often faced rigorous shoots—including one that landed him in surgery. While shooting a scene in the Sonoran Desert during the first couple of weeks of filming, he was running up a mountain face and hopped over a prairie dog hole to avoid it. “Unfortunately, I landed right above the hole, where the tunnel was, and it collapsed. My knee completely hyperextended.” He kept going and finished the take. Although he knew he was hurt, he continued filming through the next few months with two tears in his meniscus.

Then, in March, six and a half episodes into filming, production had to suddenly shut down due to COVID-19. “We had to stop in the middle of this amazing experience that we were having. It was horrible,” says Chiklis. Still, he was inspired by how the cast and crew adapted.

“The postproduction on those episodes was done entirely remotely, which was just an extraordinary and arduous experience. But it was the only way to be able to do it. I really think this will change the way the industry does business in the future.”

Chiklis says filming Coyote brought back memories of making The Shield.

“Sometimes, when people watch something on TV, they’re watching with this benign, removed attention,” he says. But, he’s not interested in that. “I want to affect people. I want to make people feel something. It’s so satisfying when I make something that entertains people, but also gets them thinking, gets them engaged, and maybe makes them see things in a different way.”

How muralist Lena McCarthy transformed a Victorian firehouse

By Marc Chalufour | Photos by Janice Checchio

"Every project is so, so different,” says muralist Lena McCarthy. She has painted murals in Chile, India, and Ireland, as well as the United States. She might paint a 100-foot brick wall one week and multiple sides of a concrete courtyard another. So when she accepted a commission to transform the front of a historic century-old firehouse 30 minutes from her home outside of Boston, McCarthy (’14) wasn’t phased by the challenge.

Jannelle Codianni, director of ātac, the community arts center that has organized exhibits and live performances in the Framingham, Mass., firehouse since 2008, gave McCarthy a lot of freedom with this project—but it was no blank canvas. The mural needed to span three large bay doors. Small window panes would interrupt the design while brick columns topped by iron sconces split it into three panels, creating a giant triptych. McCarthy would be trying to reflect themes of hope, connection, and resilience.

Over four hot days in June, muralist Lena McCarthy (‘14) transformed the front of a historic firehouse in Framingham, Mass., that now houses ātac, a community arts center.

Codianni wanted to hire a local artist and reached out to McCarthy, a past exhibitor at ātac, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve been closed to the public since March and are preparing to start our fall season with virtual performances,” Codianni says. “I’m hoping the mural reminds people we’re still here, even if in a different form for now.”

The two met in April to discuss the project. Then McCarthy got to work.

Finding Her Way to the Wall

McCarthy’s mural career sputtered at first. She founded a mural club at BU, but it was a failure. “We only did one project,” she says, a mural in a Brighton park. The club disbanded after McCarthy graduated.

The fine arts major knew she wanted to paint, but graduated without an immediate career plan. “I was interested in traveling and seeing the world,” she says. She moved to Chile, where she taught English for two years. McCarthy immersed herself in Santiago’s active street art community. “It was a very stimulating environment,” she says. By the time she returned to Boston, she considered murals to be her primary focus.

To work as a muralist, McCarthy says she had to learn “how to be brave and put yourself out in the world and how to make connections with the community you’re painting in.”

McCarthy found that her fine arts training served her well in muralism. But there were still some new skills she had to learn, among them, “How to be brave and put yourself out in the world and how to make connections with the community you’re painting in,” she says. Helping her make that transition has been a series of mentors, including Cambridge, Mass.–based street artist Caleb Neelon, coauthor of The History of American Graffiti.

“There’s a lot of graffiti history intertwined with muralism,” McCarthy says. Part of that influence is the value of visibility—finding spaces that will be seen by the most people. McCarthy estimates she’s completed between 30 and 40 murals, and as she’s established herself, she’s begun considering other factors. “I’ve looked for more projects where the site has meaning, or the site has impact, like neighborhoods that don’t have as much public art.” Sometimes that means a work has an explicit social message: McCarthy collaborated with Neelon on murals in Queens, N.Y., of Gynnya McMillen, a 16-year-old who died in police custody, and Marsha P. Johnson, a gay rights activist who died under suspicious circumstances. McCarthy is planning murals for the playroom and garden at a home for teen moms.

Drawing from Within

Once McCarthy and Codianni had discussed the goals of the firehouse project, she began the same way she starts every project: pencil on paper sketches. “A sensation or a feeling of ‘hope’—that’s an infinite thing,” she says. “I tried to just draw from within myself, what I believe that would look like. It’s my interpretation of the language that they asked me to use.”

McCarthy expects her art to evolve once she begins to paint. “I always have to leave room for it to breathe—I never make things exactly as they look [in the sketch],” she says.

Accepting a commission means agreeing to some limitations. In this case, that meant sticking with ātac’s color palette. Fortunately, the teals and blues contrasted nicely with the building’s red brick. Some commissions involve several rounds of revision, but there was no micromanaging of this project. McCarthy presented four sketches to Codianni and the ātac board. Once they chose one, she imported her drawing into Procreate, an iPad app. Using an Apple Pencil, she refined the drawing, added colors that matched the paints she planned to use, and layered it onto a photo of the building.

“One of the main things I love about mural painting is it’s so in your body. It’s so cheesy but it’s true: You become the tool. You’re the brush.”

McCarthy expects her art to evolve once she begins to paint. “I always have to leave room for it to breathe—I never make things exactly as they look [in the sketch],” she says. McCarthy began her mural career using brushes and rollers, but she’s since moved to fine art spray paints, which allow her to work fast and cover just about any surface. Color selection is important—she can’t mix paints as an artist with a palette might. But, she says, “there are ways to blend and overlay colors.” McCarthy uses two types of spray can caps: a skinny cap creates fine lines while the versatile New York fat cap has a broader stroke for filling and shading. It can even create a mist effect. By adjusting her finger’s pressure on the cap, the can’s angle to the surface, and the speed of her arm, she can create different visual effects on the wall.

“One of the main things I love about mural painting is it’s so in your body,” she says. “It’s so cheesy but it’s true: You become the tool. You’re the brush.”

The Many Layers of a Mural

On June 17, McCarthy unloaded her Honda Civic in front of ātac and began painting. Then, over four hot days, she transformed the façade of the firehouse.

McCarthy worked within ātac’s color palette of teals and blues, which contrasted nicely with the building’s red brick façade.

McCarthy’s gear, beyond the 22 cans of spray paint she had estimated she would need, is limited. She has an adjustable ladder and sometimes uses a piece of cardboard as a straight edge. And, she says, “A friend gave me a really nerdy muralist’s tool belt that I wear [so] I can hold six spray cans.”

“On the first day, the goal is to get ready to paint,” McCarthy says. She scrubbed the wooden doors and laid out some of her design’s straight edges with a chalk line. Then she sketched the more organic shapes with spray cans. She also used a paint roller on an extension arm to draw on the wall from a distance so she could see what she was doing.

When she returned the next morning, she began covering the doors with paint. She filled in dark background colors, then began layering on lighter shades. Over the next three days, the contours of her design took shape. Three tiered triangles extend toward the center of the building while the natural curves of leaves and grass blades spring up behind them.

McCarthy began her mural career using just brushes and rollers, but she’s since moved to fine art spray paints, which allow her to work fast and cover just about any surface.

Some muralists project their design on a wall to provide a guide, others use stencils. “I’ve never been a very exact person,” McCarthy says. “I just go for it, and if it’s wrong, I fix it. I think the organicness of my stuff lends itself to that method.”

She checks her work frequently, though, backing away from the wall and asking, “‘What did that stroke just do to the whole thing?’ It’s kind of like this dance back and forth.”

After working her way to the lighter end of the spectrum, it was time for some final flourishes. “I make some wispy lines that weave through everything,” McCarthy says. “And I do some starburst-like dots. Those are the last little highlights that make it sparkle.”

The Art of Inclusion

McCarthy’s completed mural evokes a moonlit scene. A dark sky emerges from the recesses of the doors’ arches. Grasses reflect light and bend in a gentle breeze. Delicate dandelions appear ready to release their seeds. “I’m using organic forms to convey a sensation,” she says. “I wanted it to feel like there was a light or an energy coming from within the space.”

Floral elements permeate McCarthy’s murals. “There’s a really strong male energy in graffiti, and my work can have a more feminine vibe,” she says.

Scroll through McCarthy’s Instagram account, @lenamccarthyart, and you can see why she uses the word organic to describe her work. Floral elements permeate her designs. A mural in Cambridge, Mass., features a red heart sprouting colorful leaves and branches. Female figures are also a frequent motif. “There’s a really strong male energy in graffiti, and my work can have a more feminine vibe,” she says.

Reflecting on the difference between her outdoor work and studio paintings, McCarthy says, “There’s something about public art and muralism that’s so inclusive.” No curator has chosen where to hang the painting. No museum guard stands nearby. “You’re injecting color in your neighborhood—it’s fun, it’s energy. We should live our lives surrounded by art all the time,” she says. “To me, that’s a no-brainer.”

Joel Christian Gill (’04) (left) and Charles Suggs (’20).

Artists Joel Christian Gill and Charles Suggs discuss using their work to tell lesser-known stories from Black history

Edited by Mara Sassoon | Photos by Hannah Rose

In the wee hours of May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved Black man, stole the Confederate ship the CSS Planter. It was the middle of the Civil War, and Smalls, one of the Planter’s eight enslaved crew members, steered the ship away from a dock in Charleston, S.C., after its white captain, pilot, and engineer disembarked for the night. Donning the captain’s hat as a disguise, Smalls picked up his family and the families of other crew members and sailed out of Confederate waters and into freedom.

Little-known stories from Black history, like that of Robert Smalls’ sail to freedom, fascinate Joel Christian Gill, an associate professor of illustration at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Gill (’04) explains that he’s not exclusively interested in stories about “Black firsts—like the first person to do this or that,” but rather moments in history “that would be amazing no matter what race a person is—like, stealing a Confederate warship is amazing, but stealing a Confederate warship when you’re an enslaved African is doubly amazing.”

Inspired by the comics he loved to read and draw growing up, Gill tells these stories in graphic novels, starting with Strange Fruit, Volume I: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History (Fulcrum, 2014), which chronicles the lives of figures like Theophilus Thompson, a former enslaved person who became the first Black chess master, Marshall “Major” Taylor, a world champion bicycle racer, and many others. The New York Times said of the book that “at a moment when racial inequities have ignited this nation, Mr. Gill offers direction for the road ahead from the road behind.”

Joel Christian Gill's comics tell little-known stories from Black history. Pictured here, a page from Gill's Tales of the Talented Tenth, No. 3, which tells the story of Robert Smalls, an enslaved man who stole a Confederate ship and sailed to freedom. Image courtesy of Joel Christian Gill

Gill has gone on to write and illustrate Strange Fruit, Volume II: More Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History (Fulcrum, 2018) and a memoir, Fights: One Boy’s Triumph Over Violence (Oni Press, 2020). He is also the author of the Tales of the Talented Tenth series, which comprises  individual graphic novels about notable figures in African American history, and the children’s book Fast Enough: Bessie Stringfield’s First Ride (Oni Press, 2019), and has illustrated a forthcoming graphic novel adaptation of Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at BU and director and founder of BU’s Center for Antiracist Research.

Like Gill, Charles Suggs is fascinated with researching lesser-known stories from Black history and exploring them in his art—a passion he only started pursuing recently. For many years, Suggs (’20) worked as an administrative assistant  at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he finally decided to apply to BU’s MFA program. “I was feeling restless. I want to do this, why am I not? I want to be a professional artist,” he told the Boston Globe, which in May 2020 named him one of “5 outstanding art-school grads for 2020.”

Suggs admits that “sometimes I’ll end up spending so much time on research that I have to just shake myself and tell myself, ‘Get to work on something now, or else you never will.’” At first, Suggs was making mostly drawings, then transitioned to working with oil paints. “But, there were so many different mediums that I liked and wanted to use, like watercolor markers. I wanted to find a way to use them all in one way, so to speak.” That’s when he started experimenting with video and animation. “With video, you can see all the different work that I’m doing, all the mediums I’m working with. Video is a format that can output it all.”

This is evident in his video Shadrach, which tells the story of Shadrach Minkins, a Black man who fled slavery and went to Boston, only to be arrested in 1851 under the Fugitive Slave Act. Members of an abolitionist organization infiltrated the courtroom where Minkins was being tried and helped him escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The piece blends video footage, animated pencil drawings, digital drawings, and prints along with images from Suggs’ research.

Charles Suggs' video Shadrach tells the story of Shadrach Minkins, a Black man who fled slavery and went to Boston, only to be arrested in 1851 under the Fugitive Slave Act. Video courtesy of Charles Suggs

Gill and Suggs spoke this summer over Zoom about why it is important to tell little-known stories from Black history through their art and using their work to address issues of race and racism.

Joel Christian Gill: Charles, I don’t know about you but I think for the first couple of weeks after George Floyd was murdered, I spent a lot of time just avoiding. I bought a grill and decided to try to do some really long cooking—like briskets cooking for about 12 to 15 hours—just to have something to focus on to not think about what was going on.

"For me, it was like, “Not again.” It feels like America has had this great awakening to this thing called racism that has existed and has been happening for years and years."

-Joel Christian Gill

For me, it was like, “Not again.” It feels like America has had this great awakening to this thing called racism that has existed and has been happening for years and years. The only thing different is that the cell phone footage is showing us the things that have been happening behind the scenes for all those years. Honestly, I drew a comic about it that was just me sitting at my drawing tablet with a word balloon that just said “F*ck.” Because that’s how I felt.

But at some point, when you have a platform, whatever that platform may be, it’s your responsibility to say something. So, slowly, I started to creep out and make art related to what’s happening. I got on a soapbox on social media. My work is telling stories about obscure Black history. That has always been what I do. I’m just doing what I normally do. It’s almost like I was already over here, and I feel like everybody else is coming now. And they’re like, “Hey, this is a really new thing you’re doing, why don’t you explain it to us?” And I’m like, “I’ve been here for a long time, I’m settled. The grass has grown around me. I know exactly what’s going on.” So, that’s kind of how I feel. What about you, Charles?

Charles Suggs: Quite similar, honestly. All of these historical things are coming into focus again. Now it’s people saying “Wow,” about what happened in Tulsa in 1921, and I’m like, “I’ve always thought about that.” I think about that a lot, especially around Juneteenth time. When I saw the George Floyd footage, I was just thinking, “Man, if there wasn’t such a thing as cell phone video, we wouldn’t be here discussing what happened.” It would have just been what the police said, end of story.

I was absorbing all of this at that time, and I wasn’t doing a lot of drawing. But what started me drawing again was when [New Orleans Saints quarterback] Drew Brees said he doesn’t agree with kneeling during the national anthem. He said something like, “My grandfathers fought in World War II for this country,” and I started thinking about Black grandfathers who fought in World War II and what they came back to. There are historical stories about that and I started sketching some of them. One of them is a very brutal story about a Black soldier returning from World War II who happened to be wearing his army uniform. He was attacked by a mob, and they gouged his eyes out. And that’s not an isolated story. I want to compare how some people came back to a hero’s welcome—if you were a white soldier. But, what was that like for a Black soldier?

JCG: In the case of Drew Brees, this is the height of privilege—never having to think about this other thing and to only be self-centered on what your family has done. That’s the thing people like Drew Brees need to understand—we’re not talking about you right now. White men between the ages of 35 to 40 are not many times more likely to be killed by police. If you say Black and white people are the same, then the only thing you can point to that is the difference here is systemic racism. There are people who refuse to understand that, and it makes me angry.

CS: That makes me angry, too, and I spent a lot of time trying to check my anger. I was yelling at the TV on a lot of things. The fact is that these are people who are dying over something like selling cigarettes.

JCG: It’s like the bar has been moved for what the death penalty is: It’s “Oh, he ran”; “He was asleep in a Wendy’s parking lot.” Those should not be death sentences. But they are if you are Black. And that goes back to the history of what has happened to Black men.

History doesn’t lie. I try to just tell the truth with my work. When I say truth, I mean what people were saying at the time, because you can’t really argue with that. I try to be as honest with history that I think that you possibly can. With that honesty, you have to understand that, in this context, history is super complicated in that sometimes it’s not black or white. Sometimes it is gray. Ibram Kendi, who I’m collaborating with on the Stamped from the Beginning graphic novel, says in the book that anyone is capable of holding racist ideas—Black, white, anybody. When you look throughout history, it’s been as recent as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina saying, “We are not a racist country.” People of all cultures and races can hold racist ideas, and in order to dispel them as a country, we need to acknowledge we have a problem.

CS: With my work, I like to compare something from history and bring it back into the present. With the Shadrach Minkins piece I did, I focused on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced local municipalities and police forces in the North to help the federal government retrieve people who ran away from slavery and send them back into slavery. I compared that with Executive Order 13678—I actually remember that number by heart now. And that is a part of a federal act that was enacted in 2017 by the Trump administration that basically says local municipalities, police forces, must help the federal government in rounding up people who they suspect are illegal immigrants in this country. It’s striking to me that that law, which came about three years ago, is so similar to the Fugitive Slave Act from 170 years ago. They’re so similar in language and execution.

"It’s striking to me that that law [Executive Order 13678], which came about three years ago, is so similar to the Fugitive Slave Act from 170 years ago. They’re so similar in language and execution."

-Charles Suggs

JCG: The more things change, the more things stay the same. Through the years, there has been significant progress, but then significant setbacks, and I think that those setbacks are a direct result of us not dealing with the fact that this is a racist country. It was built for straight, cisgender, white, land-owning men of a certain age—that’s codified in our Constitution. And there hasn’t been a law that has changed that. We tweaked it a little bit. We have never dealt with the underlying problem of why we have these issues in America in the first place.

CS: Do you think we’re on that road of dealing with the underlying problem now? Does it feel different? I keep hearing people say, “Things feel like they’re going to be different now.”

JCG: Honestly, not with the politicians that we have in charge right now. They just don’t believe it. To support a racist system, all you have to do is follow the rules set in place by the people who built that system. I think as long as people like Tim Scott will stand on the floor of the Senate and say we’re not a racist country,
we’re going to have this problem.

"Maybe some form of our art will be born that we never could have imagined before the world changed."

Ginnifer Goodwin

Actors Ginnifer Goodwin (’01) and Russell Hornsby (CFA'96) provided students words of encouragement during the pandemic in their appearances on From a Distance: BUTV10 Variety Hour. Hornsby recommended students take the time to watch some of the Television Academy Foundation Interviews, a collection of almost 1,000 interviews with actors available to watch online. Goodwin told students, “This is time to reflect, to read plays, watch movies and filmed theatrical performances, write, and observe. It will serve your creativity in unforeseen ways.... I can’t wait to see what you make of things.”

The virtual showcase was produced in May 2020 by BUTV10, Boston University’s student-operated media production and distribution network.

Maria DeCotis Turns a Coronavirus Press Briefing into a Hit Video

By Taylor Mendoza | Photos courtesy of Maria DeCotis

When comedian and actor Maria DeCotis watched New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s April 19 coronavirus press briefing, she knew she was witnessing the perfect fodder for her next routine. After discussing hospitalizations, nursing homes, and testing, Cuomo switched from covering the state’s COVID-19 response to talking about his daughter Mariah’s boyfriend, who would be joining the governor’s family for dinner later that night. “He went on this long tangent. It was so mesmerizing. He just kept going and going, and I was like, ‘When is he going to stop?’” says DeCotis ('15). “He said, ‘I like the boyfriend,’ so many times, and I thought, ‘There is no way he likes the boyfriend.’”

DeCotis decided to make a parody video of the press briefing, inspired by political lip-sync videos on TikTok that were popularized by Sarah Cooper’s spoofs of Donald Trump. Using clothes and makeup she already had, DeCotis set up a tripod in her New York City apartment and filmed herself lip-syncing to the press briefing audio, then edited it all together. In the video, she plays three roles: Cuomo, his daughter, and “the boyfriend.” As Cuomo, DeCotis gets increasingly frazzled, taking an exaggerated swig from a bottle of wine and, eventually, waving around a knife while continuing to discuss “the boyfriend.” Interspersed throughout are reaction shots of DeCotis as an embarrassed Mariah Kennedy Cuomo and the nonplussed boyfriend.

Watch DeCotis’ hit parody video of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s April 19, 2020 coronavirus press briefing. Video courtesy of Maria DeCotis.

“It was basically a one-woman production company,” DeCotis says. “I played [the press briefing] over and over again, and I broke it up into parts to get the timing just right. I didn’t write it out. I figured it would be easier just to listen to it.”

DeCotis started experimenting with comedy as a member of the School of Theatre’s improv group, Spontaneous Combustion, and while studying abroad in Italy, where she took classes on commedia dell’arte. She’s since opened for Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show, The New One, on Broadway, and performed in off-Broadway productions and commercials.

But the Cuomo parody has helped her reach a much broader audience. After she posted her video to Twitter on May 1, it quickly went viral, racking up more than one million views. She was interviewed by Rolling Stone and Today. The video’s success inspired her to make other Cuomo spoofs, which she posted to her YouTube channel.

“Alec Baldwin has retweeted a few of my videos, Chrissy Teigen retweeted a couple, Lin-Manuel Miranda—which is mind-blowing—Padma Lakshmi, and Stephen Colbert retweeted a few of mine. It’s pretty exciting.”

In mid-June, Cuomo announced he was ending his daily briefings, and DeCotis’ fans questioned what she would do next. They’ll have to wait and see, DeCotis says. “I can go with whatever’s happening in the world.”

“To have a huge space, to be looking out at another huge space, that freed me up to think about the past.”

Nicole Hollander

"It blows my mind how the filmmakers take the actors’ audio performances, then use that video reference to bring the animals to life.”

John Bartnicki

"Pathos, solace, mystery, terror, beauty—all of that is possible when you paint with your voice. It’s exhilarating.”

Alfre Woodard