Ex-Calhoun Broken Window ​“Mended” At Yale

Imagine 10 years from now someone in a Yale dining hall gazes up at a stained-glassed window with jagged graphic banderoles reading ​“Broken is Mended” and inquires: What in the world does that mean?

Then someone can explain that that’s the very window, the very place where way back in 2016 Yale cafeteria worker Corey Menafee shattered a slave-themed image in a residential college — inspiring a campus wide reckoning with history and race, as well a renaming of that college from an infamous segregationist to a pioneering mathematician.

Charles Matassh had that vision of the near future during a downtown public library-hosted conversation about the recently installed new stained glass windows at Yale’s Grace Hopper College, formerly known as Calhoun College.

Fashioning, in both art and life, a way to move forward without completely erasing the past was at the heart of the public conversation Monday night that Matassh attended, along with 50 others, including many Yale art students. The event took place at the New Haven Free Public Library’s Ives Main Library community room on Elm Street.

They were there to celebrate this summer’s installation at the Yale residential college of 12 new windows designed by distinguished African American artists Barbara Earl Thomas and Faith Ringgold.

Thomas, a Seattle-based artist, was on hand to inaugurate a small exhibition of the mock-up designs for her six windows, on view in the library’s rotunda through the end of the year; the new windows themselves can only be viewed by Yale students and staff inside the college. 

“I think of my work as coming alive only when someone comes in contact,” Thomas said in conversation with her interlocutor, Yale School of Art Masters of Fine Arts student Christopher Paul Jordan. ​“The mock-ups are not copies of the work. It is the work. It needs to be seen.”

Monday’s conversation took place more than six years after Menafee, who then worked as a dishwasher at the Yale residential college that was then named for 19th century slavery proponent John C. Calhoun, smashed a stained-glass panel depicting enslaved Black people carrying bales of cotton. He subsequently lost his job, spent the night in police lock-up — and became a celebrity and, along with countless other town and gown activists, convinced Yale to drop Calhoun’s name from the residential college. In February 2017, the university renamed the college after Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneering female mathematician, computer scientist, engineer and naval officer.

In Monday’s library-hosted conversation between an older and younger artist, the interchange was as much about process – key to Thomas’s work for which she involves cutters and many other studio assistants and helpers – as about the result.

And yet just how to use her graphic, story-telling talent to deal with the past – that is, the slavery-evoking images of 1804 Yale graduate and one of slavery’s most outspoken defenders, John C. Calhoun – was Thomas’s task alone, she said.

She said she wanted to bring her literary and graphic image making strengths to bear in a manner that did not seem like she was wandering around the problem but to address it head-on: ​“The wound is still there, but we are moving on.”

One result, for example, is in ​“Winds of History,” where Calhoun’s pennant is being carried out and Hopper’s forward. ​“I’m trying to say that history is moving on. But I needed something to move it,” Thomas said Monday night.

In a lovely example of how artists think, enter the birds. The robin is carrying away Calhoun into the background of the composition and a hummingbird is centering Grace Hopper’s banner.

Any significance to the choice of birds? 

No, replied Thomas, whose manner is both matter-of-fact and inspiring in its modesty. ​“I love them and they were just outside my window.”

Here are some other highlights of Thomas’s reflections during Monday night’s conversation: 

Jordan: How did you come to art?

Thomas: I grew up in a house where we didn’t go to the store to buy things. On her birthday I made something for my mom. Art was a gift. Yale’s project is really part of this gift-giving. This [the Hopper College stained glass window commission] is the smallest dot in the universe, but what I can do.

And the pandemic was a little bit of gift to the process. We slowed down. The students [whom Thomas interviewed as part of her research] were able to tell me: ​“I want the maintenance and kitchen staff to be represented.” Also they wanted to see the confrontation [surrounding the university’s prosecution of Corey Menafee] and the population change beginning in 1969 [that is, the arrival of women as undergraduates]. All this was perfectly obvious, but I wouldn’t have thought of it and I was able to channel this collaboration back in the studio.

In ​“Broken is Mended,” isn’t it the case for African-American artists that often something has to be broken before we enter and mend? There’s some grief there, something you refuse to erase. No plastering over the issues that undergird this institution. The gift to me is that you offer this.

I’d prefer not to be called because I’m Black. I am coming as a whole person, not as a Black fixer. I’m bringing all of myself. I’m Barbara. If you want only that little part of me, that’s your problem. I also don’t want to do a ​“backward corrective.” I’m sorry but that’s fiction. I think we’re strong enough to take it now. It’s our history. People who aren’t Black are now living in a dystopia we’ve been familiar with for a long time, but I’m encouraged. Let people come without some of the scars we have. That’s what I mean by ​“Broken is Mended.” Come with an open heart. Our solutions must be not in the extinction of the other but in our surviving together. [That’s represented in] the structure of the lines and the light shining through.

Click here for a full presentation of the windows, six by Ringgold and six by Thomas, along with two recently installed glass-and-metal portraits of Hopper and Roosevelt Thompson. Thompson was president of the Calhoun College Student Council in 1984 and died tragically in a car accident in his senior year; the Grace Murray Hopper dining hall is named after him.

The exhibition is on display in the Library’s rotunda through Dec. 31. In addition there may be other public programs related to it announced in the coming days, said Luis Chavez-Brumell, deputy director of the Library. The other sponsors of Monday’s event included the Yale School of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Yale University’s Office of the President.