“Everything Is Political In America,” Including The Art

Howardena Pindell had already created the spiraling mess of oranges, yellows, blues, and greens, footprinted with red arrows indicating the path of the swirls, when she realized that the lithograph resembled a hurricane tracking map. She titled the piece Katrina Footprint, memorializing the over 1,800 people killed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. What was once a relatively simple design of colors and shapes became a political statement. In hindsight, it feels as if the politics were already embedded in the art. Pindell only had to bring them to the surface.

Katrina Footprint is one of many images with a message on display in the Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition ​“Everything is Political in America,” running now through mid-November. ​“Everything,” it turns out, includes the art. The exhibit touches upon many of the issues affecting the country today and in the past, running the gamut from environmentalism to the AIDS crisis to gun violence. That art transmits important messages about the world we live in, through paintings, prints, and multimedia pieces.

From a distance, Jasper Johns’s lithograph Two Flags resembles the bark of an old, gnarled tree. The play of light and shadow across the black-and-white piece creates a rippling effect, as if the piece were in perpetual motion. As with Pindell’s Katrina Footprint, the viewer must look closer to appreciate the political message. The two flags suggest a nation divided in its duality, but the similarity between them, the way the strokes fade into each other, implies that perhaps the two halves are not as distinct as they might at first seem.

Fritz Scholder’s Bicentennial Indian also makes use of the U.S. flag. It was part of a show celebrating the U.S. bicentennial; In 1976, the Kent State University Bicentennial Commission asked 12 American artists to ​“represent their personal experience of independence, a founding ideology of American democracy.” Scholder chose to depict an Indigenous American, decked out in Betsy Ross’s flag. The bright colors make the piece impossible not to notice, and the message is clear: Indigenous peoples are about as American as you can get.

Kara Walker’s Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, from the portfolio Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) uses traditional imagery to reframe a dark period of U.S. history. She takes an historical image of Confederate soldiers leaving Atlanta, and overlays it with a silhouette within a silhouette. The technique redirects the viewer’s focus to frame the Black figures in the picture, making the viewer reconsider the image and what it says about the American South at the time. Sometimes history, Walker is saying, is all about what you choose to look at, whose story you decide to tell.

With some of the artwork in the gallery, the viewer has to look closely to discern the political message. At first glance, Hugh Steers’s Bath Curtain looks like nothing more than two men sharing a tender moment in the bathroom. But look a little longer, and the viewer notices the anxiety with which one man is holding the other’s wrist — not just in affection, but almost as if he were checking for a pulse. The second man’s face is covered by the titular curtain like a shroud. Bright color palate aside, a deep sorrow infuses the painting. It’s there in the posture of the two men — one hunched over with worry, the other reclining stiff as a board — and their hidden faces. Bath Curtain is a tribute to the AIDS crisis, which killed Steers in 1995. The beauty of the ambiguous painting lies in the fact that the viewer empathizes with these men in their distress, before realizing the nature of their affliction.

Death is dealt with more explicitly in Félix González-Torres’s Sheet from ​“Untitled” (Death by Gun). The offset photolithograph stacks photos, names, and facts about 464 people killed by gun violence in the U.S. during the week of May 1 to May 7, 1989. The sheer volume of names is intended to overwhelm the viewer, making them face the magnitude of the tragedy. But at the same time, the use of photographs draws the viewer in, emphasizing the individuality of each life lost. In the original display, viewers were encouraged to take home sheets with names and faces on them, so that the dead would not be forgotten.

Peter Murphy was visiting the Yale University Art Gallery on a family vacation when he entered the ​“Everything is Political in America” exhibition. ​“It’s excellent, I’m impressed,” he said. 

Some people believe art and politics should stay on either side of a very high fence; others say that art is inherently political. Murphy disagreed with both. ​“I think art should be what the artist wants it to be,” he said. ​“It can be political. There’s a lot of amazing political art.” The exhibition itself was a testimony to that fact.

Art is supposed to make you feel things, and come away thinking about the world a little differently. What better way to transmit a political message? The artists in the show communicate their point of view through beauty and craftsmanship. Good art may or may not be political, but this political art certainly is good.