Stephen Mangum was too young to understand what was going on in his small Delta town in 1960s Mississippi — the epicenter of civil rights activism and racial cruelty.
“It was in the area where Emmett Till had been abducted and murdered. As a child growing up, I heard the name Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and of course Martin Luther King, but we were kids and it wasn’t at the top of our minds. We were too busy being kids,” says Mangum, 66, a San Francisco artist who works out of the ICB in Sausalito.
It took Mangum more than five decades to explore more deeply the events that shaped his childhood and the world.
The result is “Illusions of Childhood,” a series of large-scale color portraits of White children — using his grandchildren as models — transparently superimposed on black-and-white scenes of racial injustice, from police dogs being unleashed on nonviolent protestors to a lynching.
The impetus for the series came in November 2018, after Mangum and his wife visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Among the exhibits was one on Till, an African-American teen who was lynched for allegedly offending a white woman.
“It still brings me to tears. It was such an emotional day. The two of us sat there and sobbed,” he says. “I came away thinking that the very ugliest fiber of humanity was on display. When I left the building, I was ashamed of mankind.”
That’s when Mangum began to pivot his art to exploring themes of racial justice, and a year later began painting the series.
“I wasn’t exactly sure where it was going to go, but I knew that what I wanted to communicate was that a lot of the racial injustice that occurred still happens now. Sixty years on, we still haven’t made much progress,” he says.
His first three, a triptych, feature portraits of Till, Evers and King, with one of his grandchildren transparently painted in color on top, all about the same age he was during Mississippi’s racial turmoil.
“I thought, OK, this is perhaps giving homage to civil rights icons, but I’m not sure it’s communicating the message I want to send,” he says.
His next painting, “Freedom Summer,” better captured what he was seeking. In it, two of his grandchildren appear juxtaposed over a FBI poster of three missing civil rights activists, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who had been attempting to register African-Americans in Mississippi to vote and who were eventually found murdered.
It’s a more personal painting, he says. Mangum’s family used to vacation at Choctaw Lake in Mississippi’s Tombigbee National Forest, just 30 or so miles away from where the three men were abducted in 1964.
“I remember the chaos that was going on in the community at the time,” Magnum says. “I didn’t know what was happening. I just remember a strange air that was all around.”
“Freedom Summer” was just accepted into the 80th Crocker-Kingsley Biennial, and will be on display at Roseville’s Blue Line Arts from Jan. 8 through Feb. 20.
The children in his six paintings in his series — he’s working on a seventh — all are enjoying an ice cream cone or popsicle. “It’s just happy, carefree innocent children in a world where atrocity is pervasive, and you’re trying to reconcile this conflict,” he says
The background to painting “No. 6” re-creates an image taken by the late Associated Press photographer Bill Budson documenting the use of police dogs on nonviolent protestors in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1963. It was selected for the National Oil & Acrylic Painters Society’s fall 2020 exhibition.
Magnum began his art studies as a teen. In fact, his progressive-minded parents let him study under the late DeWitt Jordan, an African-American artist known for depicting life in the impoverished Mississippi Delta.
“My town was segregated. His studio was in the Black part of a town, a loft above a funeral home. One day after high school, going up to the studio, and there was a nude model there, a young White woman and I thought, my God, he’s really taking risks here.”
But Magnum abandoned art and instead pursued a career in finance, which led him to living in Hong Kong for a decade. When he retired, he and his wife moved to San Francisco and he began studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 2016 and immediately moving into the ICB.
One of his paintings from a previous series, “Reflections,” is included in “The de Young Open,” an open call show that celebrates the de Young Museum’s 125th anniversary.
The father of three and grandfather of four, Magnum uses his grandchildren in his art for a reason.
“It’s obviously personal to me. It reflects my DNA both in the sense that the grandchildren are my DNA and the civil rights movement is in my DNA,” he says.
Magnum is hopeful “Illusions of Childhood” gets people to question their own relationship to the racial injustices that still persist.
“I think they’re a call to action. It’s obvious you’re not going to look at them and say, ‘That’s a pretty painting.’ They’re meant to be provocative. I’m definitely pushing the envelope,” he says. “They’re meant to be stimulating, and hopefully stimulating in a way that opens your eyes.”
To learn more about Mangum, go to stephenmangumartist.com
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ICB artist revisits the racial injustice of his childhood in 1960s Mississippi - Marin Independent Journal
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