Each day, as members of the Taft community pass through the Mortara wing, they are reminded of the courageous and talented Black Americans who, sometimes unwittingly, helped shape U.S. history. Sixteen stunning black and white portraits created by students in John O'Reilly's Intermediate Painting and Drawing class hang outside the dining halls, in tribute to those whose lives—and in some cases deaths—deeply impacted our nation.
O'Reilly was, he says, moved by Taft's Martin Luther King Jr. Day presentation, developed by Dean of Multicultural Education Andrew Prince.
"I felt I could build off of it, allowing students to voice their feelings, concerns, and hopes for current times, through art," explains O'Reilly.
Students were asked to select a subject whose impact helped shaped the Civil Rights movement in our country—a person with whom they felt some connection. It is a concept with roots in Gerhard Richter's 1972 48 Portraits.
"Richter created 48 Portraits for the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 1972," says O'Reilly. "In it, he depicted 48 individual portraits of solely white, central European and American men born 1824-1904 whom the artist considered to be notable writers, composers, and philosophers. For our version, I wanted to reach much further."
All of the works developed by O'Reilly's students were executed in grisaille, or shades of grey, traditionally used as an underpainting for oils. In the context of this particular assignment, O'Reilly saw the use of the technique as an opportunity for students to create paintings where only value is concerned.
For as long as Celia Torino '23 can remember, baseball has been a big part of her family life. That connection made Jackie Robinson a meaningful choice for her grisaille painting.
"He broke the color line' as a starter at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947," Celia says. "The impact was great; when the Dodgers signed Robinson, they announced the end of racial segregation in professional baseball, that had organized black players to the Negro Leagues since the 1880s. It was a civil rights victory, a referred to as a momentous cultural shift."
And while some students selected their subjects for connections to their personal lives, others selected subjects for their connection to the current moment in our history, including Hannah Englander '24, who painted Virgil Lamar Ware, the 14-year-old Alabama child lynched by white, anti-integration teens.
"His death was on September 15, 1963; the very same day as the KKK's 16th Street Baptist Church bombing killed four young girls of color and the shooting of Johnny Robinson, another black teen who lost his life to a white shooter," Hannah explains. "Their deaths and stories helped fuel the Civil Rights movement and later Black Lives Matter movement. They are lives that should never be forgotten."
See all of the extraordinary pieces in the slideshow below.