WHY AMERICAN WOMAN: A LYNCHING SERIES
WHY AMERICAN WOMAN: A LYNCHING SERIES
Her body is the canvas, mocha hues, set against her country’s red, white, and blue backdrop, telling our story for generations.
I’ve always been a fan of pin-up art and erotica and have been greatly moved and inspired by the works of artists like Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, and Hajime Sorayama. However, for as long as pin-up has existed as an American art form, few images have focused on Black women, and none of the few illustrations merged historical elements into their compositions. Painting nude or semi-nude women does not interest me in and of itself. Painting “pin-up” art of Black women had to be about more than “Look, white artists do it. I can do it, too.” The traditional phrase “pin-up” and its close relationship to the word “lynching” was too enticing to be ignored. Hence, the series appellation. The word “lynching” redacts the word pin-up in my mind and so is reflected in the series logo. Between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched. Lynching typically involved extreme brutalities such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, immolation, and desecration.
Why a lynching series? What could I possibly be attempting to do? Idealistically, there are several things I hope my series will address. Using the Black female body as a totem for issues that have faced the larger African-American community; hopefully, forcing candid conversations about racial inequities is my intent. The Black woman, having internalized a foreign value system and attempting to imitate her white counterpart, becomes a distortion of herself. Highlighting an appreciation of Black beauty that might manifest in the abandonment of fake fingernails, false eyelashes, and the wearing, weaving, and gluing of hair from other ethnicities onto their heads would be ideal.
Also, I wish to reconsider the cultural origins of presenting the Black woman as “strong and independent,” brimming with a “combative attitude,” and how that stereotype has sometimes benefited and simultaneously harmed her image. The artistic merging of social/political and historical elements and the African-American female form elevates the works beyond pastiche.
Lastly, white men who appreciate the erotic nature of these paintings and are attracted to African-American women should consider these visual offerings an opportunity to experience a reckoning with the social-historical components that combine to make up what they find alluring.
This is the ideological approach to my “pin-up” art and, for me, separates my work from pornography. Truth is the goal; the Black female form is the vehicle by which larger, more complex, honest conversations about race may be sparked.
Jesus Saves
Craig Rippon
Oil and digital on canvas
195.58 cm x 134.62 cm (77"x53")
Even as I paint these images I know that they will be only temporary entertainment, distractions for children who are never satisfied always looking for the next thing they can consume until they decide they are bored and proceed to grope in the dark for the next new thing ... never dealing with the emptiness within themselves.
Long, long ago, in an age far, far away ... from social media, I made a visit to my grandparents’ house with my five-year-old son. While there, he noticed a picture of “white Jesus” on the wall and asked, “Is that God?” I responded, “No, son, that’s just a picture.”
It must be understood that my grandparents were from a different time and place: Mississippi. They were sharecroppers. Now, to many Black people, that seems like an ancient era. Just picture the cast of The Color Purple with Woopie Goldberg living in the Bronx, and you'll get the idea. In that sort of household, there were four pictures one would see on the walls: Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby, and white Jesus. There were so many pictures of white Jesus in the house one would have thought he was paying rent. Later that day, we were in the kitchen with my grandmother. My son pointed at another picture of J.C. and proudly proclaimed, “Dad said that’s not God. It’s just a picture.”
Now, that sort of blatant borderline heresy, at the least, blasphemy in the extreme, could not be overlooked. My grandmother had spent many humid Sundays dragging me to her Baptist church to listen to the minister scream and hack the gospel at me. During those services, I sat nervously next to an overweight woman and prayed that when the Holy Ghost fell on her, she didn’t fall on me.
Like my grandparents’ home, the church was also filled with pictures of white Jesus, white Jesus on the walls, and white Jesus on the fans, praying in the garden of Gethsemane (to my mind, praying to get out of that hot, steamy church.) My grandmother rose in righteous fervor and sought to educate my son and me on the dangers of heathenism and shot down my disregard for the Lord. I thought the whole thing absurd and responded, “Ok, ma, find me a picture Jesus posed for, and I’ll hang it up.” Of course, my sardonic educational wit went over like reading the Catholic Catechism at an orgy. My grandmother thought it best to manifest the spirit of the crusades. However, not having a sword handy, she grabbed the nearest instrument of God's judgment, which was an ashtray made of cast iron inscribed with “Mississippi” on it, and like Judith, who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes, she sought to disassociate my blasphemous head from my neck. Not wanting to identify with Stephen, the first Christian martyr, I saw the wisdom of a hasty retreat; grabbing my son by his hand, I ran past the gaze of white Jesus into the streets. I wondered what the brown Christ who walked the dusty streets of Jerusalem two thousand years ago would have thought of this insanity.
As I write this, I must state that I believe emphatically in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe without reservation that he died for my sins and the whole world's sins. I can say this without trepidation because He has revealed himself to me in many ways, and while I am aware of the destructive nature of white Christian nationalism and its racist foundations, I know that Christianity in its purest form started in a region of the world where if the residents of that time and place were to attempt to ride a bus in America in 1954 they would have been forced to ride in the back. Roughly 347 years before the faith of Jews, brown people, the disenfranchised, and a tragic number of martyrs became the official religion of Rome, and the Council of Nicaea determined the scriptural canon long before Christianity became “the white man’s religion” with all the evil that it entails, it was the faith of people who were as swarthy in complexion as Yeshua himself.
