Today's Hours
About this time last year, when I tentatively began returning to campus after a year of working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a large oil on canvas painting by Charles Alston (1907-1977) hanging outside the Aronow Theater on the ground floor of the North Academic Center caught my attention. At first, the subject seemed to be some kind of classroom activity, which makes sense since Alston was an influential educator who taught at CCNY from 1958 until his untimely death in 1977. At the top of the composition, an elderly, dark-skinned man writes, “Our Constitution” on the left section of the chalkboard. The words “Constitution,” “guarantees,” “freedom,” and “justice” appear on the right, adjacent to the red and white stripes of the American flag.
The logic of the classroom space, however, breaks down as one pays attention to the other figures in this complex composition. Some appear to be involved with the civics lesson taking place at the blackboard. But, clearly, other figures are engaged in unrelated activities. One group discusses an architectural model. Next to them, a cellist bows her instrument while a foreman directs construction workers on the steel beam of a skyscraper under construction outside the window to the right. Another window on the left frames the iconic United Nations Secretariat Building. Beneath the UN window, a diverse group of figures with suitcases and steamer trunks mill about, the young, indigenous Central American looking woman holding an infant in the foreground of the group looks as if she could have stepped out of a revolutionary Mexican mural from the 1920s-30s.
By 1957, when Alston painted this work, he was an elder of the Harlem Renaissance movement. Born in North Carolina, he moved to New York as a boy with his mother and stepfather. Alston earned a BA from Columbia University in 1929, despite Columbia’s institutionalized racism, which excluded him from life-drawing class because as a black man he was not permitted to draw nude white female models, and a master’s degree in art education from Columbia’s Teacher’s College in 1931. Subsequently, as an instructor in the Harlem Arts Workshop, Alston mentored hundreds of young artists, including the child prodigy Jacob Lawrence, and others, such as Bob Blackburn and Romare Bearden, who would also become recognized twentieth-century modern masters.[1] With the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s short-lived New Deal art programs later in the 1930s, Alston became the Federal Art Project’s first African American supervisor, overseeing a multiracial group of muralists including Alfred Crimi, Vertis Hayes, Georgette Seabrooke, and himself, who painted the important cycle of murals for Harlem Hospital, just blocks from CCNY on Lenox Avenue between W. 135th and W. 136th Streets. However, despite the official progressive ideology of the 1930s government art projects, individuals from the hospital’s administration objected to Alston’s interpretation of the theme Modern Medicine because it depicted black physicians. In the artist’s own words:
I had a complete integration--racial integration--perhaps with some emphasis on the brown and black people in it because that was the character of the community. The superintendent objected to this and said that his wasn't a Negro hospital-- that he wasn't going to have that kind of thing in his hospital, you know. So we decided to fight it. With the quiet help of a few of the more enlightened medical men in the hospital who operated behind the scenes, we made a big thing out of this. I don't think the superintendent expected it to blow up into such a thing. We brought the Commissioner. We brought him, and we finally won out, and the mural went up. [2]
Untitled [Our Constitution], which is part of the CCNY Art Collection, reiterates the idealistic themes of social justice so prevalent during the years between the World Wars. Alston painted such murals celebrating the civilization that we could have in this country if and when the freedom and justice that the Constitution guarantees replaces the firmly entrenched, systemic racism that continues to keep us hobbled as a nation. What struck me so strongly about this painting during those early months of 2021, and continues to strike me to this day, is how completely Alston’s mid-20th century vision of a blended cross-section of society cooperating and mutually assisting each other clashes with the fear-filled messages of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, violence, and Narcissism and the willful promotion of ignorance, greed, and strongman rhetoric that steadily emanated from the White House and rage-filled pundits during the last four years of the 2010s. So, thank you, Professor Alston, for providing us with such a principled gift of hope, which offered this librarian optimism at a particularly traumatic time in history.
1. CCNY Libraries' Hatch-Billops Oral History of Black Culture contains interviews with Bob Blackburn and Romare Bearden.
2. Charles Alston, Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, 1965 September 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
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