By Mike Pugh
Kent County Ceramic Artist, Former DC & Baltimore City School Teacher, WC Chesapeake Heartland Fellow
Washington College is beautiful and historic. But, why is the public art so bland and generally meaningless?
A couple years ago, WC students voted to have a voice in shaping bold campus spaces with fresh artworks. Abstract graphics and posters you can see at Target are essentially what the students received in return. Why?
My tile mural was selected to be acquired for the Miller Library lobby. The mural celebrates local heroes of the Underground Railroad: Harriet Tillison and James Lamb Bowers.
The theme is who gets to tell their story and why. It’s about censorship and facts. I created the mural during my 2021 Fellowship with WC’s Chesapeake Heartland: an African American Humanities Project (partnered with Kent Cultural Alliance).
Objectively, the mural is probably the highest-awarded work of visual art to come out of WC. While waiting for installation at Washington College, my mural was seen in various exhibitions. It spent months at Norfolk State University (an HBCU) after winning First Place in a juried international competition, Black Prometheus: The Legacy of Jacob Lawrence and Global Modernist Art of the Mid-Twentieth Century.
Although the mural depicts local heroes of the Underground Railroad, it was bizarrely decided by [white] faculty that the mural is a celebration of “White violence against Black women”. Wuah?! How is it credible they would passively-determine in email that my artwork represents violence after it was unanimously celebrated at an HBCU? WC Department chairs have wisely walked that back because the optics of censoring heroes of color specifically because of what a white person did to silence them are problematic. Harriet Tillison was a local free black woman who was tarred-and-feathered for helping the enslaved to escape by a mob of slave owners. She was not allowed to tell her story: the title of the mural artwork. Yes, Harriet was the object of violence. Does this historic fact bar her from being seen on campus? According to the faculty: yes!
I celebrate a student-centered process of shaping bold campus environments, and I welcome authentic conversations. I also celebrate facts and honesty.
We can do better as a community of higher learning. The mural was then acquired by the Harriet Tubman Museum & Education Center in Cambridge, MD where it is on public display.