Yannyck: This for fights for freedom, expression, liberty, death, you know?
Launching, happening, and still trying to get freedom.
So this is expression of a black liberation, black activism.
So you have Sojourner Truth over here.
That acting, I mean, leading the black people to the freedom.
You have Frederick Douglass.
Booker T Washington.
You have Carver here.
My name is Yannyck Kao Sy from MoMA.
I'm an artist.
An activist too.
Esther: So this is Charles White's first mural called "Five Great American Negroes."
I'm Esther Adler.
I'm a curator of the Charles Wright retrospective exhibition.
The Chicago Defender, which was an incredibly important African-American newspaper, both
at the time and remains so today, does a survey among its readership.
And I think the question posed is who the readers think the five greatest race leaders
of their time are.
Marian Anderson is maybe my favorite selection in this painting.
Marian Anderson was denied the right to perform at the Daughters of the American Revolution
Hall in Washington, DC.
And Eleanor Roosevelt famously gets involved and makes it possible for her to perform on
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
[singing] Marion Anderson: “My country tis of thee…”
Esther: White has included her kind of fresh from the pages of the newspaper in this massive
tribute to the accomplishments of African-Americans in United States history.
Toyin: The thing that really strikes me is how unforgiving he was about layering.
Like he was really like, he trusted himself a lot.
Like I wouldn't go as far in some of the parts he did with the eyes, but he was like it's
gonna look like an eye.
Gosh, I mean, this part, are you kidding me?
This is when you know he's just flexing.
I think a lot of people think you only use one type of tool to get this image.
It's like no.
He must have used like five different pens with this.
Different widths obviously, different degrees of color.
Esther: The furrow in the brow, and that kind of look into the distance.
It's like he's giving them space to process the world.
I don't think he was trying to put a rosy face on anything.
I think he was incredibly aware of the injustice, and the suffering, and the exact hardship
of being black in America.
But I think he was also aware of the incredible resiliency, and strength, and I think will,
to change things, that he certainly had, and he saw reflected in his community.
[singing] Harry Belafonte: “I don't want no bald-headed woman.
She can be mean, lord, lordy, she too mean.”
Esther: Charles White meets Belafonte when they are both young up-and-comers in Harlem,
and they meet through this advocacy group called the Committee for the Negro and the Arts.
And it's a group that's really aimed at changing the way that African Americans are presented
and perceived in popular culture.
This is a drawing that Harry Belafonte commissions White to make essentially of him in performance.
Toyin: This is so good.
It's kind of insane.
I'm speechless.
I'm quite seriously speechless.
[singing] Harry Belafonte: “Lord, lordy, well bow your head.”
Toyin: It's like the face is so exact, but then the body is loose.
Esther: This kind of shape of the body you get, this kind of curvature, is really reflective
of what Harry Belafonte's body looked like when he was producing song,
the sense of that kind of spirit, that intense emotional power coming from within is something
that I think White captures perfectly.
[singing] Harry Belafonte: “Hold that line!”
Esther: He uses it as the image to open up his television special.
Television announcer: “Tonight with Belafonte.”
Esther: It's an entire hour on CBS that's given to Belafonte to kind of program as he sees fit,
which is kind of incredible at that moment for an artist, especially a black artist,
to have that kind of creative control.
Harry Belafonte: “Many of the songs which our children sing, at least many I'm familiar
with, is written by a man who spent most of his life on the chain gang.”
Esther: That opportunity to work with Belafonte, to get the drawing out there and to make it
so available to so many different audiences that way was really an incredible one,
and I think one that made White up his game.
I think he did believe very strongly that African Americans were the people to make
the change that they wanted.
Oversized hands are really something that White becomes known for.
And I always think of it as being a sign of agency, the idea of showing that these were
fully realized figures who were doing things, who were accomplishing things, who were I
think leaders to be reckoned with.
Toyin: To me, that's the most gorgeous hand I've ever seen.
I mean, look at the tips.
Goodness gracious.
Like it's really hard to get something that's so stylized, but yet feels so natural.
Even that slight highlight right there.
He really must have worked his way to get that distinction between the hand, and the
sweater, and the pants.
Like that's really difficult to do in a monochromatic palette.
Esther: He's taking oil paint out of a tube, and he's thinning it down incredible with
turpentine, with solvents, until it's really, really thin.
And then he's using rags, and Q-Tips, and sticks to draw with the very, very thinned-out paint.
Once you make a mark with that oil wash, you can't take it back.
Esther: He really thought of it as a drawing.
Toyin: Are you kidding me?
This is incredible.
This actually makes this piece so much more interesting to me because he must have really
tried some different things.
Esther: I think because you're seeing the marks made originally, and then the marks
layered over it again and again, there's a sense that there's more in there, more encapsulated
in the work than we may be seeing at first glance.
Laura: I'm Laura Neufeld.
I'm an assistant paper conservator at the Museum of Modern Arts.
You can capture images that help you see more closely kind of through the paint.
Esther: He's wearing a sandwich board, and the sandwich board just says "Now."
Laura: You can see the "Now" very clearly, and then you can that he had ruled out a second
line of text.
Esther: He had initially thought about putting another word underneath "Now."
Laura: We can clearly see a J. You can see what's probably an S. And then two letters
that he seemed to start, and then change, and then he abandoned this altogether.
Some people say Jesus.
Some people say justice.
Camera Woman: What do you think it is?
Laura: Hmmm...
Toyin: Joseph?
Or Jesus?
Laura: There was actually a source photograph published in a book that this image originally
came from.
Esther: It's called “Black and White America,” and it's by the German-American photographer
Leonard Fried.
And it was a book that he put together of lots of different photographs he had taken
of African-Americans in various parts of the United States.
You can see right here the image of the "Black Pope," or the figure who then White makes the
“Black Pope.”
Toyin: It's the catalyst for what it's gonna become, and it's like I'm not interested in
this image.
I'm interested in it going through the filter of you and what comes out of that, right?
And all kinds of stuff gets attached to that image.
And when it comes out and regurgitated, it's this amazing like presence of a man with glasses.
Like aviators never looked so good.
He may have even come to this around the 70s or maybe even later that he's like I don't
have to create everything for something.
It can just be for me to explore.
And that's a freedom that not a lot of artists of color have.
Everything had to have a purpose, right?
We have to fight for pushing forward of things.
And he was finally saying I just want to do this as an artist.
And that's something that we are now just getting the privilege to do, but he was already
fighting for them.
So I think that's pretty amazing.