In her Feb. 16 letter, museum curator Carole Genshaft chided The Post's Blackberry Thorn editorial for misconstruing Aminah Robinson's mural in the new Baker University Center terrazzo. Genshaft asserted the artwork should be interpreted after considering Robinson's life history, artistic mission and previous work.
Ideally, any interpretation of an artwork should be informed by its historical and social context, as well as the artist's biography, repertoire and philosophy. However, public artwork is most often interpreted based solely on the piece's appearance, any extra information provided with the work and each viewer's personal experience. Creators of art expressly for public display cannot assume viewers will research their intent before interpreting their work. Robinson's mural is no exception. A conspicuous absence of context for the piece has caused and continues to cause interpretations of it to differ drastically from the artist's intent.
In defense of the Post editorial staff, developing an educated opinion about the mural has been extremely difficult. Robinson's book, A Street Called Home, was not readily available through Alden library, and since it is between printings, it is unavailable new and costs a prohibitive $140 used. Genshaft suggested reading Symphonic Poem, but before Robinson's Feb. 10 talk, the book's relevance to our mural was unclear. No plaque, pamphlet or information desk worker could offer context for the piece, so we were left to draw our own conclusions. For those educated in the United States, the colorful, exaggerated and stylized images can conjure up history lessons on blackface theatre or persisting stereotypes of African-Americans. Poindexter Village is removed from OU in time, geography and culture, so Robinson's mural, lacking context, either confused its Athens audience or invited a questionable interpretation.
Fortunately, Aminah Robinson brought that context to OU during a fireside chat at Baker's grand opening celebration. Robinson grew up in Columbus's Poindexter Village, where the community emphasized shared ownership, communal self-sufficiency and the transmission of history through oral storytelling. By offering up the stories and personalities from her childhood as examples, Robinson hopes to inspire us to seek out our own community's colorful history. The characters depicted on Baker's floor represent entrepreneurs and street vendors like those Robinson has found in every community that she has visited. In this sense they are universal.
Unfortunately, Robinson's words only reached the student body through that one-time event attended by approximately 40, a few paragraphs in a Post article and a solitary editorial. This is not enough to educate bustling visitors and busy students and faculty about the mural. They will not and cannot be expected to extensively research the piece before drawing their conclusions about it, dooming Robinson's well-intentioned mural to misinterpretation.
Given this inevitability, steps must be taken to help viewers divine the mural's meaning. An explanatory plaque or flyers should be near the mural and Baker Center employees should understand its purpose. Alden Library should acquire A Street Called Home, and when the book is re-published, Bobcat Essentials should buy enough copies to sell it to inquisitive faculty, students and alumni for years to come. Tours that show the work must explain it, and student orientations should mention it. As the OU community, we should also find ways to relate to the mural, to make its characters universal by finding them within our community. I would go so far as to humbly propose that the piano man, Bali-Karma, the Donkey, the Athens Book Center, and Casa Nueva are Athens equivalents of these figures.
Robinson's hope that this mural will inspire us to become more connected to our community is admirable, but if community is the motivation for the art, why did it come from a Columbus artist? The space and $155,000 invested in the mural could have been used to infuse Baker 2.0 with local flare and to support the local economy. Athens County is full of wonderful artists: the Nelsonville art community, the faculty and students of OU's art school, the Passion Works artists and more. As the Post reported in its article Pleasing Aesthetics
OU's Percent for Art Committee chose Aminah Robinson partially based on her reputation. This selection criterion has brought us what are effectively two tributes to a famous artist's childhood: Punchcard Park and the Poindexter Village mural. In choosing artwork for public display, an immediate connection to Athens should be more important than an artist's fame.
Robinson's mural is literally set in stone, but we should make the best of it by making the work's context generally known and attempting to relate its characters to life in Athens. Let us hope that future public artwork chosen by OU is well-explained and holds more relevance for Athens and fewer allusions to an individual artist's formative years. In the meantime, I will be searching Alden's new book display for A Street Called Home and Baker's first floor lobby for an informative plaque.Daniel Hoy is a senior physics major. 17
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