I’m Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Ray Charles’ project for Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin is titled (Forever Free) Ideas, Languages and Conversations. The phrase “Forever Free” connects the work to Charles larger body of production, much of which also bears this enigmatic phrase, a reference itself to the history of image making both within and about the African Diaspora in the United States.  The second part of the title, Ideas, Languages and Conversations, speaks more specifically to the site in which the work is located, the newly expanded and renovated Gordon-White Building, home to several of the university’s academic departments and centers that are dedicated to the study of historically marginalized groups. Through its presence in this space, this sculpture creates a visual metaphor for the challenges that these scholars of a broader and more inclusive American history, life, and culture have faced as they researched and championed their intellectual interests. In making the sculpture, Charles, a painter and sculptor who taught at this university for over two decades, reflected on the challenges that minority communities, of which he had been a part, faced as they worked to bring the study of previously marginalized experiences to the center of academic life on campus.

Charles looks to the evolving nature of language and material objects to inform his work. His interest in material manifestations of racism extends into his practice as an artist and professor of art. He has said, and I quote, “the source of my work comes from my love for information, sociology and creative culture… art, architecture, music, philosophy, language, its construction, application and evolution. Perhaps and most importantly, conceptual and representational applications of power throughout visual cultures past and present are amongst my most significant triggers of creative inspiration,” closed quote. The linear, triangulating shape of the crutches become a readymade material element through which a formal transformation can take place, making a new artistic configuration. By joining the crutches at their tops, Charles renders them useless as supports while suggesting increased mobility as they adopt the form of stars and wheels. Newly transformed, these readymade elements take on artistic lives in which they signify or refer allegorically to other cultural forms and symbols.

In this way, the sculpture evokes varied associations through the star forms that are created by the clusters of crutches. These can suggest the “Black Star” logo of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department housed in this building, which in turn recalls the Black Star Shipping Line founded by the early twentieth-century radical activist Marcus Garvey and the iconic Lone Star of the state of Texas. Further, each of the twenty-six stars corresponds to a different letter of the alphabet, pointing to the crucial role that language, the word, and literature have played in the history of African American culture and activism, and the development of Black studies in particular. Charles sees the artistic transformation of the crutches as underscoring these programs’ resourcefulness and highlighting the ability of its faculty to “make-do” and “make better.” 

(Forever Free) Ideas, Languages and Conversations references the perpetual state of transition in which these fields often find themselves, and the transformative impact that area studies, curricula and faculty frequently have in the intellectual lives of the students who take such courses.  It helps envision the past and passed limits and future possibilities that are present in the unique space of the Gordon-White Building.