Politically and historically correct art don't always mix
source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2009-06-15-uncomfortableart_N.htm
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JACKSON, Miss. — A bit of history is usually hidden behind a curtain in U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate's courtroom here.
It's a large, three-panel mural titled Pursuits of Life in Mississippi that was painted in 1938 by Russian-born Simka Simkhovitch. Part of a federal program during the Great Depression designed to put artists to work, it depicts a white family at a plantation-style home.
It also shows faceless black people picking cotton and a black figure in the foreground smiling and playing a banjo.
The judges of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the mural covered several years before Wingate became the state's first African-American federal judge in 1985.
"It's a picture of yesterday," Wingate says of the mural. "I wouldn't have wanted to be a juror and have to sit all day and stare at it."
It's a large, three-panel mural titled Pursuits of Life in Mississippi that was painted in 1938 by Russian-born Simka Simkhovitch. Part of a federal program during the Great Depression designed to put artists to work, it depicts a white family at a plantation-style home.
It also shows faceless black people picking cotton and a black figure in the foreground smiling and playing a banjo.
The judges of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the mural covered several years before Wingate became the state's first African-American federal judge in 1985.
"It's a picture of yesterday," Wingate says of the mural. "I wouldn't have wanted to be a juror and have to sit all day and stare at it."
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