{"id":136696,"date":"2020-10-22T16:02:44","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T20:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=136696"},"modified":"2020-11-12T08:47:33","modified_gmt":"2020-11-12T13:47:33","slug":"meet-new-faculty-michael-boyd-roman-and-the-divine-beauty-of-black-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2020\/10\/22\/meet-new-faculty-michael-boyd-roman-and-the-divine-beauty-of-black-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet new faculty: Michael Boyd Roman and the divine beauty of Black men"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Each week this fall, we\u2019ll introduce new Bates professors who have tenure-track positions on the faculty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year\u2019s nine tenure appointments are in the disciplines of art and visual culture, classical and medieval studies, economics, English, environmental studies, dance, politics (two appointments), and psychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week we introduce the ninth of our nine new faculty members<\/a>, Michael Boyd Roman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Name<\/strong>: Michael Boyd Roman<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Title<\/strong>: Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Degrees from<\/strong>: California State University, Northridge, M.F.A. in drawing; Maryland Institute College of Art, M.A. in community arts; Syracuse University, B.F.A. in painting<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His work<\/strong>: Through drawing, installation, and digital media, Roman seeks to \u201cportray the ordinary grace of contemporary Black men.\u201d His works blend elements from hip-hop and urban culture with references to art history and religious iconography, especially from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His inspiration<\/strong>: \u201cMy work is inspired mostly by my experience as a Black man growing up in this country,\u201d says Roman. Specifically, inspiration comes from what he didn\u2019t see: images that capture the divine beauty of Black men. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRarely are Black men depicted as manifestations of divine beauty,\u201d he notes. Instead, contemporary images of Black men \u201calmost always embody political or social propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Michael Boyd Roman’s Negus of the Well-Spoken Tokens #MaskOff<\/em>, 2019, charcoal and gold leaf on paper, 42 x 30 in. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When explaining the concept of divine beauty, Roman says it bears repeating that \u201cour existence is not that of a human being having a spiritual experience, but a spiritual being having a human experience.\u201d The concept of divine beauty, then, speaks to the idea of \u201cthe unseen spirit\u201d in all of us that observes what we experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in America, the evil forces of racism and white supremacy thwart the expression of divine Black beauty, giving rise to dehumanizing stereotypes \u201clike the coon and the buck and Stepin Fetchit and Sleep \u2019n\u2019 Eat \u2014 historical racial tropes that completely ignore the divinity that we all hold.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Madrid, Missouri, Morehouse<\/strong>: Prior to master\u2019s work at California State University, Northridge, Roman directed the visual arts program at Morehouse College in Atlanta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Michael
Michael Boyd Roman, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer in art and visual culture, poses on the Historic Quad on Aug. 21, 2020. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Roman was at Morehouse in August 2014, when police shot and killed an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. As protests erupted in response, \u201cit was hitting home for all my classes,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an art history course, he helped his students \u201cwalk through those waters, even though that was not necessarily in the course\u2019s wheelhouse, just to give students a chance to feel heard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By chance, or perhaps something else, Roman was just about to teach his students about Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808<\/em><\/a>, which depicts the massacre of Spanish civilians by French soldiers. In Goya\u2019s painting, the viewers\u2019 eye is drawn to one man, clearly unarmed, his arms outstretched in submission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey were like, \u2018So for a least 200 years we’ve known that hands up means \u2018don’t shoot.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe has his hands raised and he’s in this crucifixion pose facing down these faceless soldiers with their guns pointed at him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His students saw the painting, learned its history, and immediately drew connections to the current moment, especially the  \u201cHands Up, Don’t Shoot\u201d gesture. \u201cThey were like, \u2018So for a least 200 years we’ve known that hands up means \u2018don’t shoot.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Roman, helping to make \u201cthe typical Western art canon\u201d relevant to a group of young Black men \u201cwho otherwise literally can’t see themselves in the world,\u201d drove where he went with his next body of work, in which he began to use elements of the Western art canon as a bridge between the idea of divinity and its presence in Black men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf these young men could begin to see this art and history as relevant to their contemporary lives, then others could potentially see aspects of these Black young men in themselves through artwork.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is black and white<\/strong>: Roman\u2019s work is almost entirely in black and white, working with charcoal and graphite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he worked with color, Roman found that when he presented his work, \u201cthe conversation would often shift to how I was using color and away from the concepts and content and conversations that I was trying to have through the work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Michael Boyd Roman’s work often features references to Western art and religious iconography, such as Super-Predator as Pantokrator #LambInWolfsClothin<\/em>g, 2017, charcoal over pen and ink, 26 x 18 in. The racist term “super-predator” has long been used to instill fear of Black men.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

He thinks he knows why: \u201cThe colors that we see \u2014 the color of clothing, or the color of skin tone \u2014 all point to historical and socioeconomic indicators.\u201d (Pigments, some very expensive, were themselves economic indicators in Renaissance painting.) Colors were distracting viewers, so Roman eliminated them from his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides an intentional absence of color, the figures in Roman\u2019s work also avoid suggestions of wealth, status, or station in life. Clothing fades to the background; contemporary jewelry becomes rosaries or beads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, the goal is again to remove \u201chistorical racial tropes that completely ignore that divinity that we all hold,\u201d he says. \u201cI try to eliminate socioeconomic distinctions \u2014 unless they’re absolutely necessary to the conversation around the piece.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, he hopes to force the viewer to sit with, and to recognize, \u201ctheir own implicit biases \u2014 as any conclusions drawn by the viewer are a result of the viewer\u2019s own inherent beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

City and nature<\/strong>: Urban themes in Roman\u2019s work \u201cspeak to the collective experience.\u201d The natural world, he says, serves an \u201cinternal experience.\u201d In Maine, Roman wants to explore nature, \u201cjust get out, do some hiking, find some pathways. I want to go for a walk and take my own photographs \u2014 rather than going on Google and trying to find \u2018walking through the forest.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The art of teaching<\/strong>: In many instances, Roman has given students their first introduction to the arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd I’ve had many students from every grade level come into my classroom thinking that art is just simply not for them or people like them. And so making work that is relevant to their experience, by pulling on my experience and at the same time simply trying to communicate the idea of being seen, of your experience being seen and your experience being valid \u2014 that’s a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without a trace<\/strong>: In his classroom, Roman will sometimes sit down next to a student and place a sheet of tracing paper over the student\u2019s drawing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ll draw on top of it, so that they can see the difference between what I’m doing and what they’re doing, but without altering their drawing,\u201d he explains. \u201cA big pet peeve of mine was when a professor would just fix something on my drawing. I’m supposed to be learning how to do that. How am I learning how to do it if you just did it for me?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Community engagement<\/strong>: While at Cal State Northridge, Roman joined a community-action event sponsored by Schools Not Prisons, which was working to repurpose a youth detention center in the Los Angeles area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The organization took items from the center, like beds and nightstands, and gave them to artists, who in turn created artwork to reframe the items\u2019 purpose and meaning. \u201cOne artist melted down a bed to mold into something else,\u201d Roman says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For his installation The Pipeline<\/em>, Roman used several nightstands and a single bed, and covered the walls with examples of historical materials, such as newspaper headlines and wanted posters that \u201clink the institution of slavery to our current prison industrial complex,\u201d adding his own charcoal-on-paper portraits of Black male faces to the installation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
This detail of Michael Boyd Roman’s 2019 installation The Pipeline<\/em> features archival digital prints, a found prison bed, and his charcoal-on-paper portraits.
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Creating that installation was atypical for Roman. Usually, \u201cmy community work doesn’t focus on my own artistic creation but instead work as a facilitator for a group that wants to say or speak or address something through their work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Morehouse, Roman taught a mural development class. \u201cI took a class of about a dozen students around Atlanta to look at different murals and how they were engaging the community that they were in. Then we worked with them on developing their own mural for the Morehouse campus.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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