Rhinold Ponder, an African-American artist, has hated “the n-word” his whole life. So it may seem strange that his recent series of artworks – on exhibit at Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven, with an opening reception Feb. 21 – are filled with repeated usages of that hateful word: painted, collaged, prettified into multicolored logos.
Ponder uses the word to drive home a point about racism and semantics.
“Our focus on that word and the way we approach it detracts us from what the real problem is. The problem is not a word. It’s power relationships and how we are educated about the fiction of race,” Ponder says during a phone interview from his home in Princeton, N.J. “Instead of saying the word, ‘the n-word’ has been used to replace it, to sanitize our use of it. But it really does not sanitize it. It keeps us from having the productive discussion we need to have if we want to become a non-racist nation.”
So Ponder incorporates the whole word, not the sanitized “n-word,” over and over in his artwork, pounding it into the heads of viewers. He uses it on images symbolic of whipped slaves, in acrylic paintings depicting race riots, in silk-screen portraits of Martin Luther King wearing a hoodie.
And sometimes, he uses half the word, as in his two-piece series “GER: The last syllable they ever heard,” accompanied by images of lynched men.
“I never or rarely before used the word before this project. It was common in my community… That was very funny but I got tired of it because the cursing got on my nerves,” says Ponder, who was raised in the south side of Chicago. “Now I use the word more freely and often in context of this project. This project is not really about the word itself. It’s about a fiction created … to develop a political economy to suppress a certain group of people.”
Ponder depicts oppression and tried to replicate it in the way he created some artworks, as in his two-piece series, “Keloids and Scars.” He used canvases made from cut-up black leather coats, whose texture somewhat resembles human skin. After stretching the canvas onto frames, he hung the frames from trees and beat them with a whip covered with red paint, until gashes and scars appeared and oozed red.
One of the “Keloids and Scars” pieces honors prominent African-American men such as King, President Barack Obama and Colin Kaepernick and is accompanied by a bit of a Maya Angelou poem: “You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust I rise.”
Other poems are scattered throughout the gallery on themes of racism and empowerment.
In another experiment, Ponder commissioned 20 graphic artists from around the world — 10 foreign and 10 American — to create a product logo using the word. The pieces are interesting, but the story behind them is more interesting, in that it shows the entrenched nature of the word in the United States.
“I gave them all same instructions. I said, don’t use black and white,” he says. “The Americans could not follow the one instruction I gave. I received so many black-and-white logos.
“What that tells me is that racism is destructive to our creativity. It goes back to our inability to critically think,” he says. “That is one of the things I hope comes out of the project: that it forces us to think differently about the word.”
Ponder’s artwork doesn’t always tackle social issues. He also creates portraits of athletes and musicians reminiscent of Leroy Neiman.
“I like to beautify the world. I like action and sports,” he says.
But his online community pushed him toward this project.
“I run a page on Facebook ‘Beyond Black and White.’ I have 2,460 members from around the world. We discuss issues of race,” he says. “It was clear to me that we don’t have a common language that crosses differences and cultures so that we can have a productive discussion on race. Why not make it visual? Why not art?”
The exhibit is being presented by the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, a Hamden-based organization that promotes initiatives geared toward equity in education. Its executive director, David Addams, says Graustein sponsored Ponder’s show because his artwork is a good visual accompaniment to research published in 2016 by the Yale Child Study Center about implicit bias in early education.
“The n-word is intrinsically embedded in the implicit bias that affects people who are charged with the success of children of color in our community,” Addams says. “The idea of the art is how [the word] is embedded in the American consciousness.”
“THE RISE AND FAIL OF THE N-WORD: IMPLICIT BIAS AND THE N-WORD LIVING IN OUR SUBCONSCIOUS” is at Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave. in New Haven, until March 18. The opening reception is Wednesday, Feb. 21, from 6 to 9 p.m. Admission is free but registration is required: To register and see a video about the exhibit, visit wcgmf.org.
