Lest We Forget:Lest We Forget:
   
|
Like a latter-day liree (teaching) man of the African Americans of Suriname and French Guiana, Robert Templeton forces us to confront the past and present. Africans brought to Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) in South America in the early 1600s as slaves managed daring escapes from their captors. Joined by Africans who had arrived earlier and who were encouraged by the newcomers' courageous efforts, these Bush African Americans waged a one-hundred year guerilla war from the dense, almost impenetrable rain forest. The Dutch government finally realized the futility of their fight against the people of the bush, and retreated.
These African men and women fought arduous, unceasing battles, and so never took their freedom lightly. Indeed, they kept Africa alive in the New World more than any other group. With painful memories of physical and sexual abuse and laborious back-breaking work for the Dutch and the English colonialists, they still keep their past alive today through regular ancestral rituals to honor their valiant forebears. During these rituals, the head medicine man and the chief liree (teaching) man get in touch with the spirits of the ancestors and teach the history of their people. Throughout the ritual, which includes drumming, singing, dancing, and drama, important historical figures and their acts of bravery are remembered, for, in order to remain free, the memory of their past and their struggle must be kept alive.
Like the ancestral ritual of the Bush African Americans, Robert Templeton's "Lest We Forget. . . Images of the Black Civil Rights Movement" celebrates the violence and struggle of the past, and the ancestors who coerced, insisted, and goaded those resistant to change. Although Templeton might have begun his images and portraits in Africa, where the civil rights of black people were first violated, or in Suriname, where Bush African Americans regained their civil rights, he began his narrative in the 1800s with a portrait of Frederick Douglass, the prototype of the black liberator.
One winter in Miami when Templeton was painting portraits, the concept for the series occurred to him as he first encountered separate facilities for Blacks and Whites. This racism, occurring in America, smoldered in his thoughts for years. Finally, in 1967 when he was in Detroit covering the riots for Time magazine, he realized that he could remind Americans through pictorial narrative that ours is a country founded on democratic principles.
Dr. Benjamin E. Mays inspired the title of the exhibit and helped the artist decide who should be depicted. Through his own personal research and suggestions from Dr. Mays, Templeton decided how to proceed. One series of works forms a continuous narrative, showing violence, pain, and struggle. Among these works are Detroit Riots (1967), The Young Blacks (1967), Black Power or Nonviolence? (1968), Despair, then Anger (1968), Solidarity Day (1968), and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Ghandi (1968). Within this narrative, between historical events, he places portraits of men and women who fought for or embodied democracy. Portraits of many of the more recent figures, including Ralph McGill (1964), Ralph Abernathy (1964), Benjamin Mays (1964), Hubert Humphrey (1970), Rosa Parks (1970), Bobby Seale (1971), Roy Wilkins (c. 1972), and Asa Phillip Randolph (c. 1972), were painted from life.
Templeton's portraits vary widely in style and form. The Frederick Douglass portrait, for example, has a kind of "antique" quality. While Moorfield Storey, Mary White Ovington, and W. E. B. DuBois (founders of the NAACP) are a portrait trio, Frederick Douglass's face is shown in three-quarter view. Storey, Ovington, DuBois, and Whitney Young are all full-face. In yet another variation, Templeton depicts Booker T. Washington in a full-length portrait. Even though the figures and scenes are rendered naturalistically, they are not photographic, but rather one man's interpretation of what events and people looked like historically, psychologically, and symbolically.
The colors in the painting of Malcolm X are different from all the other naturalistic tones and hues used in the series. Templeton portrays Malcolm X in blue or "sad tones," because, according to Templeton, this vibrant and intense man was "cut down in his prime and because of all of the heat he got from the white establishment . . . There is a kind of wail coming out ... a blue wail . . . like a piece of blues". On the other hand, the portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., which engaged Templeton from 1964 to 1985, expresses no sadness, even though both men were assassinated. Templeton utilizes warm, mellow colors for King. The drawings and paintings vary further in dimension. They range from the petite, but nonetheless powerful, courtroom drawings of Bobby Seale, Black Panther, to the enormous, over life-size portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader, Templeton combines several media in this series, including oil, acrylic, pastel, charcoal, and collage. The surfaces of the paintings are generally very smooth with little or no texture.