Ex Voto

Artist/Creator: Russell FitzGerald (Artist)
Date: 1967
ID #: BG1344

Physical Description

Medium: oil
Support: canvas
Dimensions: 53.4 cm 101.4 cm (Object)
Object Description: Russell FitzGerald well understood that his desire for and relationships with Black men took place in the context of a white supremacist system, one that fostered a mutual distrust that burned particularly brightly in the US as the 1960s progressed. (Meanwhile, the homosexual occupied an extremely abject position excluded from mainstream American life and vulnerable to violence and self-destruction.) Depictions of any kind of communion, let alone love, between white and Black men were so powerful precisely because of this inescapable heritage, which FitzGerald symbolized through his use of the Union and Confederate flags, with slavery and the Civil War acting as key historical touchstones. This section highlights the theme of the intertwined destinies of Black and white in America, visualized by FitzGerald through ambiguous acts of embracing–smothering and of ritualized violence. The disturbing drawing “The Close” (in a nearby vitrine) relates to an unproduced rhythm-and-blues opera that FitzGerald wrote in 1966 called Sabus that featured a Black cop as a Saint Sebastian character; rather than accepting martyrdom by arrows, he is castrated behind a shroud. Since childhood, FitzGerald imagined a spiritual-psychic-racial double he called the Dark Brother, like a shadow self the artist projected onto “the urban American negro male[s]” in his life, from Bob Kaufman to Harold Reynolds: “The Self is not enough and God projections only satisfy the sub and un conscious. The Intellect aches for its proper lover. The rational heart will not stop searching for the lost dark Brother…”
-Jon Davies, 2024

History

Collection: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Credit Line: Gift of Dora FitzGerald, 1995
Related Exhibitions: That Directionless Light of the Future: Rediscovering Russell FitzGerald

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