Artist’s latest works focus on wrongful incarceration
MIAMI – Spend a little time with world-renowned Neo-pop artist Peter Tunney and you are likely to hear an impassioned elucidation on the concepts of liberty and gratitude.
They are two of the most important words in the English language, Tunney will tell you. Not as they relate to art, but as they relate to wrongful incarceration.
“Back hole, solitary, death row, they took your family and your kid,” he said. “That’s a lot to take from someone for no reason. It’s really intense, soulcrushing stuff going on 24/7 to an innocent person.”
If Tunney sounds angry about the subject, it is because he is.
“I talk about this every day of my life because it bothers me,” he said. “P.S.: When the innocent guy is in jail, generally, the murderer or rapist is free. That’s a double-whammy. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
On the surface, the topic of wrongful imprisonment might seem a world away from the inspiring art that rocketed Tunney to fame when in 1987 he decided on a whim to re-brand himself from an investment banker.
“I’m going to be an artist now,” he said he told his friends with no plan and “for no apparent reason.”
He figured it out, and today, the brightly colored words or short quotes he paints over emotionally stimulating images from newspapers, magazines and books tend to evoke optimism and hope with simple, yet powerful truths.
But look more closely at his art, and you will find a story – usually many stories – in the strategically placed headlines and photos underneath the words
layered on top.
“I want you to be able to look at it for 20 years and find new stuff,” Tunney said. “Because it’s so graphically successful, it’s so dense with information, and it’s so overwhelming to the viewer.”
Now, in two new pieces, Tunney, 60, seeks to evoke emotion and support for those wrongly imprisoned.
In partnership with USA TODAY Network, Tunney has created two paintings to raise money for the Gannett Foundation and The Sunny Center, which is dedicated to healing the emotional and mental trauma experienced by exonerees.
One piece is a five-foot-by-six-foot painting entitled “Liberty,” a word that Tunney said is “the crux of wrongful incarceration.” It will be auctioned to the highest bidder, and one NFT – or nonfungible token, which is a unique digital work of art that use blockchain technology to establish proof of ownership – will be sold.
There will be 500 NFTs sold of the other painting – a four-foot-by-six-foot piece entitled “Grattitude,” which is spelled with two t’s, as in the inseparable concept of “attitude.”
It is something exonerees tend to have in abundance, Tunney said.
“If you can do 34 years in max and come out and tell me you’re the most grateful guy in the world, we should be listening to that person,” he said. “Cause he’s got it. He’s figured it out.”
In keeping with the theme of Tunney’s passion, USA TODAY Network provided the artist with about 700 articles from some of the hundreds of Gannett papers nationwide. Each touches on the issue of wrongful incarceration or the concepts of liberty or gratitude.
To create the works, Tunney minimized and reproduced about 100 headlines, photos and print columns for each piece using gel glue to secure the miniatures to canvas stretched over durable metal frames. The images were then sealed with gloss medium and overlaid with vinyl lettering.
Mixing paint on paper plates, Tunney then swished colors across the canvas, occasionally applying pressure with his brush or dabbing a spot with a thick roll of paper towels to thin the paint, and thus spotlight certain parts.
He finished by splattering white paint across the pieces and signing them by removing paint with the butt of a paintbrush before letting them dry and then sealing them with 10 layers of transparent gloss.
“It came out astoundingly well,” Tunney said after finishing “Liberty.” “It’s like a breakthrough for me, personally. After this project, I’m probably going to make 100 paintings using that technique and vision for my basic underpainting and fundamental layer.”
As animated and passionate as he is about art, Tunney is even more so when talking about the people who around 15 years ago inspired him to get involved with the issue of wrongful incarceration.
“I was so humbled, I was so stunned,” he said of learning about one young mother who was sentenced to death for the 1976 shooting deaths of a Florida Highway Patrol officer and his friend in Broward County. “You were on death row? You? And now you’re here and you’re the most grateful person in the world?”
That woman is Sonja “Sunny” Jacobs, now 73. Today, she runs The Sunny Center in Ireland where exonerees can go to heal their souls after suffering the trauma of wrongful conviction and incarceration, Tunney said. There is a second Sunny Center in Tampa.
In 1976, Jacobs, her boyfriend Jesse Joseph Tafero, and the couple’s 10-yearold son and 9-month old daughter, were in a car driven by Tafero’s friend, Walter Norman Rhodes, who had picked them up after their own car broke down.
Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Phillip Black, the patrol officer, who was with a friend vacationing from Canada, approached the group at a rest stop just off Interstate 95. A gunfight broke out, and Black and his friend were shot and killed while Jacobs and the children huddled in the backseat of Rhodes’ car.
Rhodes sped away from the scene with Jacobs and her family still in the car. He kidnapped another man to steal his car to elude police, but was eventually caught by a roadblock.
Jacobs and Tafero held that Rhodes had been the triggerman. Despite a lack of evidence, Judge Daniel Futch Jr., a former Florida Highway Patrol officer who kept a miniature replica of an electric chair on his desk, sentenced both to death for the crimes, along with Rhodes. Tafero died on May 4, 1990 after a botched electrocution that took three tries. Witnesses reported Tafero’s head caught on fire and smoke came out of his ears during the grisly execution.
After spending 17 years in prison, five of them in solitary confinement because there were no facilities at the time for women on Death Row, Jacobs was released after taking a plea deal.
She eventually married another exoneree, Peter Pringle, who was freed from death row in 1995 after serving 15 years for double murder. Together, the couple now run The Sunny Center.
“She’s got every reason to be pissed off and she’s not,” Tunney said. “When these guys tell their stories, your problems evaporate.”
The Innocence Project, which is dedicated to freeing innocent people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustices, reports that 2.3% to 5% of all prisoners in the United States are innocent. Each 1% represents about 20,000 people, the organization said.