Sam Kerson, The Underground Railroad, Vermont and the Fugitive Slave murals in the Vermont Law School, Royalton, VT, painted in 1993 with the help of Heidi Bonner, Kenny Hughes and Fredd Lee. This is the first of two 8' x 24' panels, with four scenes in each panel. Images courtesy of Sam Kerson.
First panel: enslavement. Africans are forced into slavery and deported to America.
The website Hyperallergic strikes again with another misguided defence of regressive woke politics. In this instance an opinion piece written by Jenna Sutherland defends the students at the Vermont Law School in Royalton, Vermont, who have succeeded in bending the rubber arm of the administration to cover over and replace with tiles a set of murals by the artist Sam Kerson titled The Underground Railroad, Vermont and the Fugitive Slave.1 Since the murals cannot be removed without being destroyed, the school has decided to destroy them. According to a July 6, 2020, statement made by the Dean of the college, Thomas McHenry, “the depictions of the African Americans on the mural are offensive to many in our community and, upon reflection and consideration, we have determined that the mural is not consistent with our School’s commitment to fairness, inclusion, diversity and social justice.”2 According to an article posted in Valley News, the 1993 murals have been criticized by students and alumni. The murals show Africans being forced into slavery and sold at auction. Their resistance is depicted, as is the courageous leadership of Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as abolitionists who protected escaped fugitives.
A slave auction.
While the purpose of the murals is clearly made to honour the African Americans and abolitionists involved in the Underground Railroad, including Vermont abolitionists, so-called critics like students Jameson Davis and April Urbanowski have suggested that Kerson’s intentions are irrelevant to their personal opinions and interpretation of the works. Oblivious to the language of art, from Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism to American and Mexican muralism, they argue that the representations of blacks are “completely inaccurate” and the works exaggerate Sambo-like black features, as though the green skin colour of the whites in the murals is not also exaggerated, etc. They say: “Regardless of what story is being told, overexaggerating Black features is not OK and should not be tolerated. White colonizers who are responsible for the horrors of slavery should not be depicted as saviors in the same light.”3 The fact that this is not simply a story but is well-documented history is irrelevant to racialists who cannot distinguish the politics of slavers and abolitionists and who make a patently racist rejection of whites. In addition, when centuries of history are compressed into two murals, artistic strategies must be used to attract attention while also informing the viewer. The fact that these works perform this task with skill and intelligence is a credit to the artist and a discredit to its ostensible judges.
The working life and brutality of slavery.
As with the SFUSD School Board and its decision to destroy or cover over the Victor Arnautoff murals in the George Washington High School, the administration at the VLS has sought to satisfy the whims of a few careerist racialists. A group was created by the students to give it the semblance of legitimacy and no doubt, in the wake of the toppling of statues of the Confederacy after the George Floyd protests, there are instances of copycat indignation that spill over the threshold of public opinion but that nevertheless manufacture adherents. In 2013, a diversity committee convened a meeting in which it was said that the murals create “unsettling and negative feelings about African Americans and African American history.”4 That identity politics are now the micro-political bread and butter of the Democratic Party, the mass media and cultural as well as educational institutions is part of the postmodern attack on universalism, which makes consumer markets more important than production relations, empowerment more important than social progress and identity more relevant than political beliefs. As with the Arnautoff murals, the artist is here also more radical than his erstwhile critics. With his Christopher Columbus murals, the 74-year old Kerson, and former Middlesex, Vermont, resident is the kind of person who could teach this kangaroo court more than it could him. And like Arnautoff, Kerson has a long record of making art that supports various progressive causes, including drawings, pastels, woodcuts, lithographs and digital works that illustrate various events and individuals, including Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, abolition of the death penalty, the bombing of Gaza, GMOs, and then some.5
Resistance to slavery and the resurgence of submerged cultural expressions.
Fully justified in his somewhat solitary defence of his work, Kerson filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont.6 Although the lawsuit appeals to the Visual Arts Rights Act (VARA) to protect the works, public and professional opinion should intervene here again so that woke identitarians are not allowed to finesse vandalism-by-committee as a form of affirmative action. There should be a difference between community advocacy and pushing your weight around. While the court date is projected for October 2021, a petition has been created at Change.org with a reasonable rationale for its protection.7 One would hope that arts institutions in Vermont and anti-censorship groups will also come to the defence of these colourful and vibrant works that are no different in intention from Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave (2013) or Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet (2019), except for the artist’s identity. That the ethnicity of the artist should not be the basis for aesthetic cognition and appreciation is only one of the problems with this latest in a series of racialist imbroglios.
Second panel: abolition. Anti-slavery protesters before the Civil War, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, who was asked by Lincoln to advise slaves to escape from rebel territory during the war. Harriet Beecher Stowe urges women and children to join the abolitionist cause.
Of course artistic and political capital is not good enough for advocates of racial exceptionalism. For Sutherland, it is the diverse, read: ethnic, backgrounds of the people who attend the school that is most important, not the intelligence of these individuals and their capacity to distinguish the philosophy of Immanuel Kant from bureaucratic cant, not the Law School itself as background for the study of how to resolve social conflicts, and not the problems of neoliberal global capitalism, which one presumes the students of the school will have the occasion to contemplate during their studies. To give one indication that Sutherland is partial to the woke set, she argues that Kerson is suing the school, in the amount of $300,000, which is the estimated value of the murals, if they are destroyed. She says this rather than arguing the truth of the matter, which is that Kerson is trying to protect the works from destruction. That Kerson is advocating for the rights of other artists in doing this, and for the sake of radical art, escapes her attention. Should the murals be saved, as with the GWHS murals, we would all benefit. But progressive and emancipatory universalism is not what racialism is about. As witness for the prosecution, Sutherland reads the VARA to say that the law protects the ideas embodied in the works, but not the works themselves. One might think that she has been reading Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was so impressed with the stereoscope that he thought it would not matter if all the wonders of the world were destroyed and replaced with these miniature Victorian simulations.
Escaped slaves cross into Vermont. Harriet Tubman and an escaped slave return south to lead other slaves to freedom.
That Sutherland considers the kind of neoliberal inclusivity that rather smacks of middle-class exclusivity as a matter of “social evolution” has more in common with social Darwinism than with the interests and attitudes of the “historically marginalized” people she refers to, some of whom are depicted. Offering her “legally sound” advice as someone who specializes in art, law and activism, Sutherland argues disingenuously that destroying the works is not an act of censorship since Kerson is free to make more art. One may as well destroy Picasso’s Guernica since there are more Picassos where that came from. This response displaces and does not resolve the issue, especially since we are likely to see more copycat destruction modelled very precisely on recent precedents, as evidenced by the Chicago Monuments Project and the way that its organizers have enlisted arts professionals and ethnic museum directors, who have a professional investment in the postmodern dismantling of culture and politics, to make decisions on behalf of the public, who, on the whole, are not favourable to the defamation of revolutionary figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
A South Royalton woman blocks a slave hunter's view of fugitives. The historic village of South Royalton is seen in the background.
The social function and consequence of the woke agenda is to weaken the radical left, prop up the neoliberal centre and bolster the far right by fanning the flames of the culture war. Given the fact that the bipartisan consensus already keeps politics gridlocked between the neoliberal centre and the authoritarian right, the remaking of the radical left into milquetoast, NGO activism makes things such that there are few intellectuals, schools and organizations remaining that appreciate the problems we are facing today. Those who are satisfied to say that left universalists are in the same camp as conservative universalists wilfully ignore the agenda of the radical left. In Alain Badiou’s terms, this radicalism includes: 1) sustaining the contradictions of global capitalism; 2) staying focused on capitalism as the enemy; 3) criticizing socialist state regimes; and 4) leading the fight against fascism. The four possibilities that are opened up by the radical left include: a) organizing collective life around something other than property rights; b) production beyond specialization and the division of labour; c) going beyond identitarian units like nations, languages and religions; and d) the gradual disappearance of the corporate state and the free association of all beyond law and coercion.6
Slaves depart from Montpelier, a major station on the Underground Railroad, for the Canadian border. Montpelier was the centre of much abolitionist activity and numerous resolutions and laws were passed by the state legislature to abolish slavery.
Sam Kerson, Exhibit B, based on a photograph of a black man looking at the Kerson murals that was submitted by the Vermont Law School to the court, from the series The Muralist Imagines the Destruction of His Work, June 2020.
Please sign this Change.org petition in defence of Sam Kerson’s murals: https://www.change.org/p/vermont-law-school-stand-against-the-destruction-of-the-underground-railroad-mural and contact the Interim President of the Vermont Law School, Beth McCormack at: [email protected].
Notes
1. Jenna Sutherland, “Vermont Law School Is Right to Cover Over a Controversial Mural,” Hyperallergic (August 18, 2021), https://hyperallergic.com/669286/vermont-law-school-is-right-to-cover-over-a-controversial-mural/.
2. Cited in John P. Gregg, “Vermont Law school mural viewed as racist will be painted over,” Valley News (July 8, 2020), https://www.vnews.com/Vermont-Law-School-to-paint-over-mural-about-Underground-Railroad-35136293. See also https://vlsforum.com/2021/03/26/court-denies-mural-artists-motion-for-preliminary-relief-artist-appears-to-reference-vls-students-in-new-paintings/.
3. Cited in Gregg, “Vermont Law school mural viewed as racist will be painted over.”
4. Cited in Gregg, “Vermont Law school mural viewed as racist will be painted over.”
5. See the artist’s website at https://samkerson.com. See also the artist’s webpage for the VLS murals at http://www.samkerson.com/murals/undergroundmural.html. Kerson's artistic response to this case can be viewed here: https://dragondancetheatre.wixsite.com/underground-railroad.
6. Joseph Fawbush, Esq., “Vermont Law School Sued for Removing Artist’s Murals,” Findlaw (December 3, 2020), https://blogs.findlaw.com/greedy_associates/2020/12/vermont-law-school-sued-for-removing-artists-murals.html.
7. See the petition “Stand against the destruction of the Underground Railroad Mural” at https://www.change.org/p/vermont-law-school-stand-against-the-destruction-of-the-underground-railroad-mural.
8. See Alain Badiou, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, [2016] 2018).