Jason McCoy Gallery

Drawing Challenge X

June 17, 2020

We are thrilled to announce Nandini Bagla Chirimar, Barbara Friedman and Helen Oji as the featured contestants of our Drawing Challenge X which was inspired by words from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written on 16 April 1963. We would like to thank the artist Tony Moore for submitting these lines.

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helped to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963 -

Barbara Friedman, Pass the Duck, 2020, watercolor and oil on paper, 12 x 16 inches

“I started with amorphous pools of pigment and worked toward Martin Luther King's words, "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." The duck came first. Only then did I find the two faces on both sides of the negative space surrounding the duck. The faces are close, like people's heads in "Pass the Orange," where you hold an orange under your chin and then tuck it under the next player's chin. Only now it's mouth to mouth, and the orange is a little duck. The game is being played as a game of social mutuality. You have to keep from hurting this living thing but you also have to bring it to someone else who won't hurt it. There's a fine line between doing your share and giving another person your share to do. The image connects with King's alert to that ambiguity between taking responsibility and shifting responsibility, an ambiguity also reflected in the title with its echo of "pass the buck."

- Barbara Friedman, 2020
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