I was alarmed and extraordinarily disappointed to have learned about the large-scale mural that is slated to go up on Fort Andross in Brunswick. I certainly have nothing against murals. We have great ones in Maine. The South Solon Meeting House is a high point of American fresco. The Portland Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art feature internationally renowned large-scale murals. And if you want traditional paintings, visit the dome – the old entry hall – of Bowdoin’s Charles McKim-designed Museum of Art.
I graduated from Bowdoin (’88). And while I have been working overseas – sharing that Maine ethic of art with others – Brunswick is very much part of what I consider my home. It has long been a high-point of Maine arts, from the time Bowdoin had Richard Upjohn build the second collegiate-style chapel in the nation about 170 years ago, to the incredible work being done by artists whose studios are in Fort Andross.
The mural “Many Stitches Hold Up the Sky” will be an open wound if it is installed. It would be controversial not for any new ideas, but for the muddling of old ones. It will be controversial, not for any cutting-edge conceptualism, but for the painful fact of being mere kitsch. Brunswick deserves better.
“Many Stitches” isn’t charm – it’s harm.
To begin, this mural is loaded with offensive ideological triggers: a Black woman on her knees, a “noble savage” (an ostensibly indigenous woman) at the bottom of the ladder, an Asian woman performing for us, a beret-wearing French-Canadian woman sticking out her butt none-too subtly, tiny Wabanaki men launching a canoe, and all of them surrounded by white men pulling the strings and punctuated by two white doves – icons of the colonizing now-dominant religion.
On the Androscoggin, we see herons, gulls, cormorants, ducks, hawks and eagles, but doves? Not so much. The kicker is that this scene is “authored” by a direct reference to Norman Rockwell (by the seemingly self-portraited painter/quilter in the scene as well as the style and the “wit”). Sure, Rockwell was celebrated in his time, but he long ago came to represent an offensively whitewashed America. “Many Stitches” could hardly have been designed to be more ideologically offensive. It doesn’t remotely fit an understated, enlightened, historic, tolerant and quietly cultural town like Brunswick.
The artists behind the mural are Jen Greta Cart and Chris Cart. I do not intend to question them personally, their abilities or their integrity. It’s the commission that was wrongheaded from the start. This type of omnibus mural faded from favor about 50 years ago, since the public came to see them as inextricably bound to clichés and stereotypes in their failed, taxonomic approach to inclusiveness. No one could have pulled off this commission with its approach to narrative and content. I don’t blame the Carts, nor do I doubt their hearts.
At their best, large scale narrative paintings are a high point of Western art, but like with figurative sculpture, our sensibilities have atrophied because we have long moved past idolizing them as ideals. Even as a traditional painting, however, this is not a successful or appealing work. It’s muddled as a composition and will look awkward and disjointed if placed where planned.
Far more stakeholders in the cultural presence of Brunswick should have been included earlier in the Brunswick Public Art process. We are on the brink of bearing witness to an extraordinary embarrassment – and to harm the charm of Brunswick is to harm the livelihoods of many, as well as the otherwise handsome aesthetic of one of Maine’s most beautiful towns.
Clearly, Brunswick Public Art was out of its depth in this case; and since the mural has not yet been installed, it’s still not too late to avoid this huge mistake.
Art historian Daniel Kany is an art critic for the Maine Sunday Telegram and a former editor of the Maine Arts Journal.
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