Jonathan Harris, a Detroit-based artist, recently made viral headlines with his exhibit, titled “TRIPTYCH: Stronger Together”.
Featured in the exhibit is thought-provoking painting that featured a white male rolling paint over images of Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X. The painting was shown at the Irwin House Gallery in Detroit, Michigan and is also shown on the artist’s Instagram page.
The painting is a discourse on the figurative and literal white washing of Black history at a time where several state education boards have been making headlines by taking out minority history out of the textbooks.
Writer Jeroslyn Johnson, in their 2021 article for Black Enterprise.com, “Black Artist Johnathan Harris Raises Conversation With His Powerful Critical Race Theory Painting” writes, “debates around… [Critical Race Theory] CRT have come to the forefront in recent years following Nikole Hannah-Jones New York Times piece ‘The 1619 Project’. The far-right has raised oppositions to notions of CRT due to it wanting to highlight more of America’s history of racism and social justice when teaching the country’s history… Many conservative states have voiced their opposition to implementing CRT in their schools, with former President Donald Trump even going as far as threatening to withhold federal funding from states who added forms of CRT into their curriculum.”
Art is no stranger to reflecting the times of which the artist produces. Harris’s work and it’s ability to speak to it time is nothing short of the work done by Black artists of the past such as bell hooks, Augusta Savage, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Harris’s artwork speaks to an even bigger issue- censorship. The ongoing battle over Critical Race Theory (CRT) has sparked an immense amount of debate across the country as to why and how history should be taught in the present education system at hand. The mere erasure of important historical figures is a complete trivialization to how far America has come and how far America has left to go. With the fast-growing onset and impact of social media, discourse, and appropriate action on topics such as CRT are started to become more expedited.
Much like social media, art has been and will continue to be in the hands of the community and it is in the community that discourse and action like this should be discussed.
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