WOLFSONIAN
America's love-hate affair with freedom
Inspired by famous World War II posters, current artists present their views of democracy in modern times.
Posted on Thu, Jul. 03, 2008
BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO
Readers of The Saturday Evening Post would have had no trouble interpreting the magazine's cover for Feb. 20, 1943. The country was at war, and there was no ambiguity clouding Norman Rockwell's painting of a working-class man rising from an audience of suits and ties to speak at a town hall meeting.
Freedom of speech was at risk and, as three subsequent Rockwell covers for the magazine also suggested, so were freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Rockwell's famous series, inspired by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's impassioned 1941 address to Congress envisioning a ''world founded upon four essential human freedoms,'' is the springboard for Thoughts on Democracy, a provocative art exhibition that opens Saturday at The Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach.
More than six decades after Rockwell's paintings were used as war bond posters and added to the iconography of the American experience, the country is at war again, and the old clear-eyed notions of freedom have become smudged and fraught.
Don't expect Rockwellian images of happy holiday dinners, quiet family bedtimes or contemplative citizens at prayer from Thoughts on Democracy. The 60 contemporary artists and designers represented in the show seem to have created a fifth freedom: to riff.
The Americans in the poster New York cartoonist Robert Grossman created for the show pray to guns, fire guns, sling pistol holsters around their hips to tuck their children in at night. Even Grandma and Grandpa serve not Rockwell's plump turkey at Thanksgiving but a tray full of guns.
``My reading tells me that the No. 1 freedom Americans seem to need is the freedom to carry guns,`` Grossman said in an interview shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a handgun ban enacted in the District of Columbia in 1976 and rejected requirements that firearms have trigger locks or be kept disassembled.
''Slightly murky, cloaked in darkness,'' is how Whitney-celebrated Miami artist Adler Guerrier, a 32-year-old Haitian American, described the abstract images of his four posters, and thus the state of some freedoms ``taken in context of the war in Iraq and our response in this country to non-Christian religions and atheists.''
Another New York artist, Mark Beard, makes his thoughts on freedom starkly clear in a painting of young men in white underwear holding rifles against a gray, war-like background.
''It's obviously ironic,'' Beard said. ``How else can you make art of democracy right now? All the boys with the guns. We are so busy handing out democracy right and left -- and we are such a nonviolent society! . . . What we promote is violence, and what we promote aboard is our own interest and nothing else.''
Silvia Ros, 38, a Cuban-American photographer, laments the lack of freedom to choose whom to marry. In her poster, she takes a sepia photograph of her great-grandparents in 1920s Havana, sitting on a park bench with their two children, and manipulates it so that her great-grandmother's face is superimposed over her great-grandfather.
It looks like a photograph of same-sex partners.
''My Freedom to Love [poster] addresses our ability to passively accept government classification of people based on their sexual orientation,'' Ros said. ``Discriminated against for loving a partner of the same sex, I cannot marry my partner, adopt a child with her, file taxes with her or retain the legal right to visit her bedside should she fall ill.''
Organizers of the exhibit -- conceived by Wolfsonian art director Tim Hossler after cosmetics magnate Leonard A. Lauder donated to The Wolfsonian a set of Rockwell's ''Four Freedoms'' posters -- are thrilled with the participation of artists from as far as Japan, Russia, South Korea and the Netherlands.
To stimulate community interaction, there will be satellite ''mini-shows'' at Aventura Mall and Miami International Airport, and a select number of posters will be featured on billboards and in Metrorail and print ads.
Thoughts on Democracy runs through Dec. 7 alongside another exhibit, A Bittersweet Decade: The New Deal in America, 1933-43, about the impact of Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Both are part of Celebrating America, a series of four Wolfsonian shows on view into 2009 that examine the social, political and personal American experience from the 1930s to the present.
Although the landscape of the American experience is quite gloomy, judging by the Thoughts on Democracy posters, some artists felt newly inspired by Rockwell's idyllic scenes. ''My first thought was to be shocking, but when I look at the wholesomeness of the Rockwell poster I backed off,'' said Philip Brooker, a former Miami Herald illustrator. ``It would have felt like I was being rude to one's grandfather. I just couldn't do that . . . I wanted to cover the four freedoms in respect or as if to echo the Norman Rockwell poster.''
And at least one participant kicked up her heels.
Fashion designer Kate Spade presents a poster full of red, white and blue buttons that celebrates individuality. The biggest button teases ''Freedom to:'' and an explosion of buttons enumerate her feelings:
(heart) our wrinkles; Doodle; Whistle While Working; FLY SOLO'' (two stars stand for the o, in Army-style type); ``take a disco nap.''
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