Ashe’s legacy on display at U.S. Open
Free exhibit labour of love for widow
NEW YORK — Arthur Ashe kept everything: the receipt for his first Rolex, speeches scribbled on napkins, an autographed Time magazine with a note from Nelson Mandela on the cover. Ashe saved meticulous datebooks and his Life magazine cover story and more than 4,000 books, including several first editions, among them the first volume of poetry written by Phillis Wheatley in the 1700s.
Ashe was a bibliophile, a collector, and when he died in 1993, years after he said he had contracted HIV during a blood transfusion, he left behind a trove of history.
His widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, spent the past two decades combing through and organizing what she found. There was a letter from Mother Teresa, Ashe’s Army discharge papers, an American Express endorsement. She wanted to define his legacy, to make sure Ashe was remembered as more than the famous tennis player who died from complications of AIDS.
To that end, she created the Arthur Ashe Learning Center, which opened an inspirational art tour in his honour last Saturday. It will run throughout the U.S. Open at the New York Hall of Science, a short walk from the tournament’s grounds in Queens.
Moutoussamy-Ashe often wonders why her husband kept so many items from his life. Was he aware of his place in history? Or was it simply his nature? Regardless, in their 17 years of marriage, hardly a day passed when she did not photograph him. She turned those pictures into books and keepsakes and now the tour will make a stop near the stadium named after Ashe.
“I’ve finally gotten to this place with what I think is really the most meaningful work that Arthur created in his life,” she said.
This seemed like the perfect time for an exhibit, in this year of anniversaries and milestones. It has been 70 years since Ashe was born, 45 years since he became the first black man to win the U.S. Open men’s singles title and 20 years since his death at age 49.
Moutoussamy-Ashe paced the exhibit last Friday, the day before it opened. She showed off the acrylic globe at the centre of the tour, the one that played a video of Ashe’s life while a constellation of his quotations showed overhead in a mostly dark room.
She stood in the back, hands on hips, admiring her handiwork. The video highlighted Ashe’s background — birth in Richmond, Va., college at UCLA, the stint in the Army, the tournaments won, the books he wrote, the social activism — while Moutoussamy-Ashe swayed slightly and smiled. The quotations flashed above her head.
“I was floored,” she said of the first time she saw the finished tour. “It’s something I really had in my head for the longest time. I’m an artist, but this feels more like you’re an architect. Every time I see it, I get goose bumps.”
The exhibit’s walls are adorned with pictures of Ashe, those big glasses, tennis racket in hand. Moutoussamy-Ashe guessed she took 80 per cent of them. There are pictures of the two of them on their wedding day, Arthur clad in a fur coat; pictures of Arthur with a fan in Asia; Arthur at Wimbledon; Arthur speaking out about heart disease and AIDS.
Moutoussamy-Ashe said it took two years to conceptualize the tour, which was put together in about two months. There are three paintings on the wall that talk. They are called motion paintings, the idea borrowed from a Harry Potter exhibit. Organizers used the voice of Ashe’s niece and made it sound more masculine.
Moutoussamy-Ashe often wonders what her husband would make of 2013, what he would think about the United States 50 years after the March on Washington, what he would say to President Barack Obama about politics and sports. She thinks that Ashe would have had a Twitter account, that he would have been engaged in dialogue about gay marriage and astounded by the prize money handed out at the U.S. Open. (The year Ashe won it, his wife pointed out, the prize money for the whole tournament was $100,000. As an amateur, he received only a small stipend for expenses, although upon his return to West Point — he was still in the Army — he was given a standing ovation in the commissary.)
Ashe would care little that everyone agreed with his viewpoints, his wife said over lunch at a diner on the Upper East Side last week. He always said, “That’s why they make chocolate and vanilla,” she said. He would care, though, that athletes across sports spoke up. Maybe not the way that he did. But more than they do now.
“I wish athletes would do more,” Moutoussamy-Ashe said. “But not in the sense always of take up the torch and fight. Do more by understanding their position, their influence, the platform that they have, the privilege that they have.”
The inspirational tour grew out of the website — arthurashe.org — that Moutoussamy-Ashe created in 2007. She wanted both the site and the tour to be interactive, to bring her husband’s legacy into the modern age.
Moutoussamy-Ashe would like to see the exhibit moved into a permanent home, in Richmond or New York. During the U.S. Open, the exhibit is free, thanks to donations, and she wants it to be free in a permanent home as well.