Ongoing Panel Series Examines Black Artists as Communicators

Discussion explores art as a means to relay the Black experience when words cannot

Sacred Heart University’s fourth and most recent installment of “Heart Challenges Hate: Wrestling with the Legacy of America’s ‘Original Sin,’” examined the history and importance of Black artists in America. The panelists agreed that art is an important way to communicate the Black experience when conversation doesn’t work.

“The purpose of the ‘Heart Challenges Hate’ series is to respond with knowledge and informed and reasoned discussion to the prevalence of hatred, bigotry and violence that we experience in America today,” said moderator Michelle Loris, professor and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, during her introduction.

Loris prefaced the discussion by delving into a timeline of Black artists in America, beginning with the time of slavery, before interviewing the three featured panelists.

“Now art—whether it’s literature, music, dance, film—is always an expression of the artist’s individual vision,” said Loris. She then asked the panelists—Razul Branch, Yves Francois Wilson and Shanna Melton, from the Bridgeport area—to consider the Langston Hughes statement that Black artists have to create art as if their lives depended on it.

Melton and Wilson presented artwork to explain their viewpoints. Melton is a poet, painter, educator and author of poetry collection, Unraveling My Thoughts. One of her paintings, Kalief Browder: Transform to Transcend, was particularly relevant to the Black Lives Matter movement and the struggles Black people face in America.

Browder was detained at age 16 on suspicion of stealing a backpack, which he denied doing. He was in Rikers Island correctional facility in New York for three years, two of which he spent in solitary confinement. Upon release, he became severely depressed and eventually committed suicide. However, he wanted his story told. African Voices Magazine commissioned Melton to create an image for their back cover that would go along with a poem by Brad Walrond. Her painting was also featured in rapper Jay Z’s documentary, Time: The Kalief Browder Story.

“It’s an honor to be telling his story, too, ’cause it’s an important one, and he’s not the only one that’s happened to,” Melton said. “And so, being part of that testimony, even though he’s not here, we can still speak for him.”

Loris responded that one of the great gifts of art is that it can transcend a person’s story beyond death and keep the person relevant, preserving his or her legacy.

Wilson, a multidisciplinary visual artist and co-owner and curator of Bridgeport Creates, is a photographer by training who paints, as well. He got his start documenting family trips down South.

“I transitioned my work from documenting my family’s story to documenting my friends’ stories, because I noticed that I didn’t see any of my friends photographed in a way that I liked in any book or magazine,” said Wilson. “It was either hyper-violent or sensationalized.”

Wilson said he studies photography because he wanted to perfect his technical skills, specifically when it came to lighting. “My goal was to photograph dark-skinned Black people technically perfect,” he said. “Growing up, I just noticed how badly Black people were photographed, especially dark-skinned people…even in commercial photography. So, during my schooling, I focused less on theory and more on lighting.”

Photographing Black people more realistically began at first as a challenge to commercial photographers who were earning large sums of money every year. Then, he observed his subjects’ pride when they saw themselves captured in a more accurate way that mirrored their self-images, and that became his motivation instead. “I think that, by rendering any subject in a certain way, it gives a sense of pride to them and also makes people feel that their story is worth telling and adding to the global conversation of what is and isn’t important visually,” Wilson said.

The third panelist, Branch, is executive director of the Bridgeport Arts and Culture Council and founder of Magnacon 7 Enterprises. Responding to Loris’s question about the Langston Hughes quote, he said communicating through art is important because of the difficulty of having conversations about race. ”(Art) can say things that can’t be translated or rationalized into words sometimes, or that is just hard to communicate to another person,” he said, but experiencing something through art or performance may move people “in a way that the words, through a normal conversation, may not be able to communicate.”

Melton joined in, reciting a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “‘If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’ And I think that’s the core of it all. It’s like, if you don’t talk about what’s happening and what’s hurting you or your people, there will be another narrative. And throughout history, for Black people, there’s always been the truth and what they tell you.”

For this reason, Melton said, she does not believe artists should be silent. “Sometimes you just want to paint something basic and let it be basic, but you know that there’s always gonna be a larger story, a larger history to it,” she said.

Branch added that he believes Black artists should be able to step away from that perspective and be able to create art that is not political from time to time. “It will consume you, you know, eventually,” he said.

Wilson had his own take on Loris’s question. “To be able to create freely as a Black person in your experience without constriction—historical constriction—is the ultimate goal,” he said. “And I think once you’re able to do that, you start to be able to tell a story that is ultimately universal.”

Following the discussion, there was a performance of the songs “Make Them Hear You” from the musical Ragtime and “Glory” from the movie Selma, featuring John Michniewicz, SHU’s director of choral programs, and Erick Sanchez, cantor and vocalist.

A video of this talk can be found on YouTube. It was sponsored by SHU Community Theatre, the College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Catholic Studies and the Center for Catholic Studies.