“Hidden After Offending, Mural at a State Office Is Back, for Peeks Only,” reads the headline of a February 2013 article, written by Jessie McKinley for the New York Times. The article describes the unveiling of mural in New York’s State Education Building. The mural, however, is not new. The mural was commissioned in the 1870s and is titled, “The Genius of America”. McKinley’s description of the mural follows, “a sprawling 30-foot-long fantasy… whose depictions include angels, babies and women in togas; Gen. George Washington and a god of war; and what seems to be a group of colonial zombies rising from the grave. Amid that symbolic swirl, in the lower right corner, is a striking and some say unsettling image: a slave in loincloth being held under the arms by a well-dressed white man.”

            In 2000, due to complaints from department staff members that the mural was offensive, it was covered up with nothing less than an emerald green curtain. Still, some are unsure whether or not the slave was depicted as being liberated or subjugated by his white counterpart. However in 2012, the department’s commissioner decided that it was time to pull it back, for a single hour, once a month. The controversy surrounding this image indicates a complex relationship to imaging and remembering the history of race relations in America, in this case between White European and Black African Americans. In support of the mural’s re-unveiling, Wade S. Norwood, a member of the state board of regents, was quoted in the article, “I see it to be dated and stilted, but that was the stylistic portrayal of many of the figures in that painting… And that’s an important thing for the New York State Education Department to teach.”

"The Genius of America"by Adolphe Yvon

            Present in Norwood’s quote, and Commissioner John B. King’s decision to re-unveil, is the tension between a sense of obligation to remembering the seriousness and violence of race relations in America, and a desire to erase that history.

            Kara Walker’s installation, Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, typifies the difficulties of publicly re-displaying (and in Walker’s case re-appropriating) images of objectified, exaggerated, stereotyped, black bodies. Many viewers were hopelessly unaware of their (re)enacting power dynamics similar to those interpreted as offensive in “The Genius of America”. In other words, an encounter with re-presented, trauma-laden, charged images of black bodies made visible a contemporary, lingering crisis in the way said bodies are interpreted, touched, and seen.

Initially I thought that King’s modest re-introduction of “The Genius of America” was far too modest, that lingering and problematic collective trauma should be handled more aggressively. And why does he set up its audience to be voyeurs? Remember? “For Peeks Only” reads our headline. I imagined the mural’s viewing schedule being flipped so that the mural would be hidden for only one hour, of one day of each month. I wanted this despite my opinion that the mural is not as emotionally or psychologically manipulative, as loaded, as Walker’s work. I do wonder which is more productive, and I must give Walker the benefit of the doubt. In Walker’s work, the art becomes its reactions to it. It is revealing. In Subtlety, she pulls back a curtain, holds it back, and makes us look at something truly unsettling present in contemporary America’s collective power relationship to black bodies. Walker’s work succeeds in activating latent racism, whereas King’s curtain attempts to control it.