This Mural is Racist?

In a small alley off of the Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vermont, you will find a mural painted on a wall entitled "Everyone Loves a Parade." The mural depicts several actual people in the group, and has been there for a number of years.

Recently, a local individual complained that the mural was "racist" because it did not depict any "people of color". While that individual is entitled to an opinion, it's not one I support. To me, the mural would be racist if it included a person or people of color and depicted them in a negative or demeaning way. To me, people who take direct action, such as uttering racial slurs, distribute flyers demeaning or insulting people of color, deny service to these people, or other similar actions, are racist. 

Is this artist, who is expressing his vision, and not doing anything one way or another related to people of color, being racist? By the same extension of this logic, Da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper is racist. So is Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Paintings of groups of people by Rembrandt and Renoir would also be racist. All of Norman Rockwell's paintings (except one: The Porter from 1947) would be racist. Even Disney's Seven Dwarves would be racist because neither Grumpy nor  any of the other dwarves is a person of color. The fact that an artist does not include a person or people of color in his or her work does not, in my mind, make it racist.

Does the fact that I happen to like the mural make me a racist? While I can, at times, be very opinionated and judgmental, I prefer to judge people by their character and by their behavior, rather than by the color of their skin and to view art by what it contains, rather then by what it does not. 

For those out there who, because of my views, would believe me to be racist, my response is to quote His Dudeness:

Meeting Wendell Gilley

I doubt that many of you have ever heard of Wendell Gilley. If you happened to live in Southwest Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island, many years ago, and were in need of a plumber, you called Wendell Gilley.
Born in 1904, Gilley started out as a plumber in the 1920's. In his spare time, he started carving birds as a hobby. Starting in 1931, he entered into a business arrangement with Abercrombie and Fitch to supply carvings of small birds, which he sold for $5. His most famous, and probably largest work, was the eagle for the Wannamaker's Department Store in Philadelphia.
Eventually, Gilley's career as a plumber tapered off, and he turned to bird carving full-time. He had a shop just off of the main street in Southwest Harbor overlooking the harbor, and it was there that I met him in 1980.
My father had been a minister in Southwest Harbor and, when he moved with the family to Pennsylvania in the early 1960's, his farewell gift from the church was a carving by Wendell Gilley, which I own today.

The piece depicts a seagull landing on (or taking off from) a piece of driftwood. The gull is carved from wood and hand-painted, and the legs are made from lead (Gilley had collected old lead weights that had been used for balancing tires and melted them down to cast the legs, which were then painted). The piece sits in my office at home.

In 1980, it was before my father had given me the seagull carving, and I wanted to own a Wendell Gilley carving. I have made about thirty trips back to Mount Desert Island since moving away and, on this particular trip, I stopped by the Gilley workshop. He was sitting in the shop working on a carving, while there were probably a couple dozen other carvings in various stages of completion laying around. I introduced myself, and told him I was interested in buying one of his carvings. I also mentioned that I had lived in Southwest Harbor with my family years ago and that my father owned one of his carvings.

He asked about my family, and I told him about my father having been the minister at the Congregational Church on High Road. His comment, if you can imagine someone talking in a distinct Yankee accent, was "Ayuh. I knew your father. Never went to his church, but I knew your father." He then went on to tell me that he had several orders for pieces, and that the wait to get to mine would be about two years. Two years is a long time, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go down that road. I thanked him for the opportunity to meet him and for his time, and left.

In 1981, The Wendell Gilley Museum opened in Southwest Harbor. Wendell Gilley died in 1983 and, although his workshop was not preserved, the museum houses some of his works as well as works by other wildlife carvers.

I have been in contact with the museum and, as part of my estate planning, I am going to donate the seagull carving to the museum later this year, on my next trip back to MDI. Hopefully visitors to the museum will enjoy being able to see this piece, as well as many others created by Gilley and other talented artists.