Michelangelo Lovelace, Streetology

0:00:06.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: We are at the Akron Art Museum at this amazing exhibition of the work of Michelangelo Lovelace, “Art Saved My Life.” We’ve stopped in front of a painting called Streetology.

0:00:17.4 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: I’m really excited to share this picture and Michelangelo Lovelace’s work in general. He’s an artist who was born and raised and lived nearly his entire life in Cleveland. He had formal art training, but he chose this simplified style so that it seems as if these things are coming right from his mind into the picture.

0:00:35.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: I love the forthrightness of his work, and that’s especially clear in this painting, not only in the direct rough handling of paint, but the way that the painting is mapped out. And I use the word map specifically because it’s as if we’re looking at the city, but also somehow we’re looking at a map of the city.

0:00:51.7 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: Lovelace looks at the city grid as a place where he can fill it in with all manner of different things. And it’s not like it’s the actual city. It’s like an idea of a city. In the bottom left, we have the University of HardKnocks, which specializes in survivalology. So survivalology already is a really suggestive word. The idea that surviving in economically depressed inner city area could be considered perhaps as an academic kind of a skill set. It’s serious, it takes thinking, it takes extended study before you can understand how to live the life that Michelangelo and people like him had to figure out without necessarily a written instruction manual, but with communal wisdom. So there are degree programs in all manner of things from pressure management, to hustling, to kick ass and take no prisonersology.

0:01:43.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: That curriculum is listed under a street sign, which is Life’s a Bitch Avenue. And I love the way the avenues define this space. We have the horizontal at the bottom and then we have a street that recedes into the distance, but does it with a kind of incredible velocity. And so you get the sense that life is quick, that this is all speeding by. And I find it interesting that that street has only one detour, that there are almost no turns we can make. On the left we have the University of HardKnocks, but behind it we’re confined to the street by a tall steel fence with barbed wire at its top, which defines the perimeter of a large prison and a graveyard.

0:02:23.0 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: It’s Mr. Charlie’s Super Maxi Prison Plantation. And the prison connects across the canvas to a billboard that spells out the text of the Amendment XIII, which passed just after the end of the Civil War, which outlawed slavery except involuntary servitude is still allowed as a punishment for a crime. And Lovelace highlights in consequential red, that word except the idea that one can be convicted of a crime and then forced to labor can very rightly be viewed as a continuation of slavery, particularly in the United States where policing is not equal across races and Black Americans are more likely to be incarcerated and then potentially subjected to forced labor. However, at the bottom of the prison sign it says that this is a prison for Blacks, Hispanics, whites, and others. So there’s an understanding not just of race, but also of class. And you see the police cars bleeding new people in with the police dog, the police van that’s labeled 666 suggesting something devilish.

0:03:23.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And then just at the top of the prison you can make out a guard tower with two armed police training their rifles down on the population below. And the power of that image feels especially acute because it’s paralleled by another ubiquitous institution by a school.

0:03:39.4 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: Lovelace was often painting in response to current events, and he dated his pictures oftentimes not just with the year, but also with the month. So this one is dated July, 1999 and the Columbine school shooting that really shocked America. That happened in April of 1999. So this is just three months later, he’s including a school shooting in this picture, the school yard on the one hand, got a swing set, in the other hand it’s another graveyard. And for even a school to turn into an institution that can’t be trusted or that can’t be assumed to be safe, that presents a really pretty harsh overall picture of the major institutions of American life.

0:04:20.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: Beside the school, we see God’s House of Worship, but like the school, the doors are closed. The prison doors by contrast are open. And then just adjacent to the church is a corner store that’s selling beer and wine. And while the church steps are empty, there are plenty of people there.

0:04:37.5 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: Lovelace talked about there are times in life where you have the choice of which path you’re going to go down. And his urban environments suggest that you really have occasions to make that choice on a pretty constant basis.

0:04:50.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: I’m really struck by one of the billboards. You see two policemen, one with his gun trained on a Black man’s body that has been shot multiple times. And to the right it says, “freedom ain’t never been free for us.”

0:05:01.5 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: Across left Lovelace’s career, you can see protests against police violence. He insisted on this as an issue for a long time.

0:05:10.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: He’s also made room to reference bricks and they seem over life size.

0:05:14.8 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: Lovelace grew up in a variety of different parts of inner city, Cleveland in public housing, and they were all invariably made out of bricks. Lovelace from that gained a love of brick architecture. When he and his wife Shirley bought their first house in 2015, they made sure it was a brick house.

0:05:32.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: And because the painting is so visually compelling, it draws us in and it invites us to spend time with the realities that it raises.

0:05:41.4 Dr. Jeffrey Katzin: This whole show. You see representations of really difficult, intractable issues and it can feel like a lot, it can feel tough. But I always urge people to see the positive side of Lovelace’s pictures. I think an honest appraisal of the world around us covers the good and the bad. And even with the harsh issues in this picture, if we can point to the things that are making life unfair or unreasonably difficult, that’s a first step toward doing something about them. There’s always this sense of there being a next step to take. It’s not the end of the story.

This work at the Akron Museum of Art

Akron Art Museum, Michelangelo Lovelace: Art Saved My Life, exhibition catalogue (Akron: Akron Art Museum, 2024).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction