To support JMU student civic engagement in the upcoming elections, this digital exhibition represents the collaboration of three separate entities: the James Madison Center for Civic Engagement, faculty from the School of Art, Design, and Art History, and objects from the Madison Art Collection.

The featured works by Ben Shahn, a prolific American artist who believed strongly in civic responsibility and art as activism, are drawn from the Madison Art Collection’s extensive Shahn holdings, thanks to gifts from Mr. Michael Berg and the Ben Shahn Estate. Dr. Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History in the School of Art, Design, and Art History provided scholarly text on the artist and individual works. The James Madison Center for Civic Engagement helped support the presentation of these works of art through the lens of 2020. For more information on civic engagement, voting, and more, please visit Dukes Vote: Election Connection.

Ben Shahn (1898-1969) is among the most prominent of the socially engaged, left-wing American artists who came to the fore between the onset of the Great Depression and the end of World War II. Born into a working-class, Orthodox Jewish family with whom he emigrated in 1906 from tsarist-controlled Lithuania to the United States, Shahn grew up in the poor yet ethnically rich immigrant neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. These densely populated, multicultural environments, especially those with vibrant Yiddish culture and leftist politics, deeply impacted his artistic sensibility. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Shahn was a politically progressive painter and graphic artist who worked for U.S. government agencies, labor unions, political campaigns, and civil rights and peace organizations, devoting his art to fighting what he perceived as injustice, marginalization, and persecution.

Shahn’s art remains relevant today as a model of civic engagement. He tackled subjects that he felt were a threat to national and global progress, and believed that artists have a special responsibility in society to respond, interpret, and give meaning to the worlds in which they live. This is best summed up in his 1953 essay, “The Problem of Artistic Creation in America,” in which he wrote:

"For life, seen and valued by the artist, emerges with new meaning. It is not just the artist’s experience, but his values, his judgments, made with love, or anger, or compassion, that live in the work of art and make it significant to the public. For they change and modify the public’s own values, and create meaning where there was none before."

In the 1950s and 1960s, Shahn was an active participant in the American civil rights movement and a passionate proponent of the global struggle for equality. As a Jewish immigrant who experienced anti-Semitic persecution first hand, Shahn’s commitment to fighting racism was fueled by the experiences and lessons of his own heritage.

Shahn pictured several male martyrs of the civil rights era such as the icon of non-violence Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) as well as famous historical heroes like abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass (1818–1895). Among the artist’s most haunting images are these simple line portraits of three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who were brutally murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. The images of the men (one Black and two white), who were all in their early twenties at the time of their murder, were based on news photographs. Part of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) during “Freedom Summer,” they were involved in what was then the dangerous work of registering Black Southern voters.

Sold in portfolios enclosed with Edwin Rosskam’s text Martyrology, Shahn’s prints were used to raise money for the Human Relations Council of Greater New Haven, Connecticut. They served to memorialize the horrific killings and propelled President Lyndon Johnson’s support of Congressional enactment of landmark legislation on civil rights. Indeed, Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964 and the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

Shahn created this print as a tribute to the heroes or martyrs of the civil rights era, specifically the victims of racial terror that plagued Alabama in the 1960s. In the final version, for which MAC’s work is a study or incomplete state, the image features a peace dove above which Shahn wrote in a white, child-like cursive script the names of ten of these martyrs. These include the names of four Black girls who perished from a bomb blast set off by Klansman in September 15, 1963 at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama: Denise McNair; Carol[e] Robertson; Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins.
 
Below the bird’s open wing, Shahn wrote in his influential folk lettering a portion of the 1928 poem, I Think Continually… by the British poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995), who was noted for his devotion to social justice and class struggle. The last four lines of the poem poignantly express how Shahn saw those who gave their lives to the freedom struggle:

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun.
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

In the MAC’s incomplete version of the print, the image has no bird, only the names of the civil rights martyrs and the Spender poem. Due in part to Shahn’s rendering and placement of the texts, the print still carries the power of its message.

Text by Dr. Laura Katzman, Professor of Art History, James Madison University

For more on Ben Shahn, see Laura Katzman, Drawing on the Left: Ben Shahn and the Art of Human Rights (Harrisonburg: Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, James Madison University, 2017; second printing 2018).