Why Politicians Don't Make Great Art Critics
Civil unrest in Ferguson made national headlines after the 2014 shooting of black 18-year-old Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson. Although Wilson was found not guilty of wrongdoing in the death, which he said was in self-defense, Ferguson has become an important -- if imperfect -- rallying symbol for crusaders against police misuse of deadly force.
One might take Pulphus' painting as a wake-up call to attack the root causes of our racial, social and political divides. Instead, some people want to hide the art.
But lawmakers should be cautious about that. Attempts to censor can come back to bite you.
I am reminded of another art-vs.-politics dispute in which the racial roles were reversed. In 1988, a group of angry black Chicago aldermen marched into the esteemed School of the Art Institute of Chicago to take down a painting of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington only months after his death.
The painting, titled "Mirth and Girth," was painted by David K. Nelson, a student with a reputation for outrageously irreverent work, according to news reports.
Those were tense times along racial fault lines in Chicago politics. Washington was revered in many black Chicago households as much as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Yet barely a day after the painting was taken down it was put back up, an acknowledgement of how freedom of expression should never lose out to politics.
Ironically, one of the leading aldermen in that protest was Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther leader who has since became a popular Democratic congressman -- and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has been supporting fellow member Clay and the display of Pulphus' painting.
The moral of this story: Don't rush to censor someone else's expression; you might want to use your own freedom of expression someday.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
