Artist honors Black lives lost in exhibit
As you walk through Larry Winston Collins’ new exhibit — portraits of Black Americans killed on American streets and in their homes — you might be struck by one thought: There have been so many.
“They That Matter,” one of two of the artist’s series on view at Fort Hayes Metropolitan Education Center’s Shot Tower Gallery, presents nearly 40 portraits of Americans who were either killed by police or were victims during the civil-rights movement. They range from 14-year-old Emmett Till who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, to the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and 21st-century victims including Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, George Floyd and Andre Hill, who was killed in Columbus.
Disturbing but not surprising is the fact that many of the names might be unfamiliar, or perhaps just forgotten in the wake of the shooting that came next.
Collins, 66, who is Black, was inspired to create the bulk of the exhibit upon discovering a 2015 cover story in Time Magazine that focused on the killing of an unarmed Black man, Walter Lamar Scott, who was stopped in North Charleston, South Carolina, for a malfunctioning brake light. He was shot eight times and died. The article continued to document the cases of other
Black Americans who were killed and carried the cover headline “Black Lives Matter.”
Creating the portraits, Collins said, “was one of the hardest exhibits I ever had to work on.”
“It was physically a lot of work, but mentally, it was draining. Dealing with the subject matter and then looking at the faces — just really draining.”
Some of the portraits are acrylic painted in black and white and some are in color, painted on wood board that was covered with plaster and giving them a three-dimensional quality.
Each face is surrounded by an ornate frame. For civil-rights martyrs such as the Birmingham bombing victims, the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers, Collins made the frames with found objects such as soup and pop cans and pieces of old frames. Frames for the more contemporary portraits are elaborate constructions in gold and silver, often with geometric features and additions of significant materials.
The frame surrounding Trayvon Martin’s portrait includes shredded fringe made of Skittles candy wrappers and cans of Arizona fruit cocktail, two things Martin was carrying when he died.
The imposing frames, Collins said, are intended to enhance the portraits, honor the victims and command viewers’ attention.
The exhibit was previously shown in a Rochester, New York, gallery and at Miami University in Oxford where Collins recently retired as an art professor.
He said he will not continue creating works for the series although he said, sadly, he expects shootings have not ended.
Beyond paying tribute to the victims, Collins said, “I just want people to become aware of how many of these cases have taken place in the past few years. I want people to take this seriously and start thinking about what they can do.”
In addition to being a printmaker, painter and mixed-media artist, Collins is a photographer and the Shot Tower Gallery includes “Captured Moments,” a selection of his photographs. These are both black and white and in color and of diverse subject matter, ranging from scenes in Columbus and Cincinnati, where he lives, and scenes from his travels to Europe and Africa.
And, Collins is also a musician. In fact, he played percussion with the Mark Hampton Jazz Experience at the opening reception for his own exhibit.
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