An Inspirational and Subversive Modern Art Masterpiece
Rupert Garcia's "No More O' This Shit" (1969) and how it inspired me many years ago.
This post is quite different from others here at The Lint Trap. It doesn’t really have anything to do with my research. I’m not an art historian, and there’s not much I can say about the image in this post other than my personal relation to it.
The image is of a painting by Rupert Garcia titled, “No More o’ This Shit” (1969). At first glance, it’s striking, funny, subversive, and provoking. It does what all great art should do - it makes you reframe your references, rethink your realities. It makes you blink and stop and think:
The piece is a “color screenprint on wove paper” according to the National Gallery of Art, and it has been widely displayed over the decades. Here’s a write up about it from Maurice Berger at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, who knows more about modern art than I do and curated the online digital exhibition titled, “For All the World To See”:
At first glance, this poster by the Chicano artist and activist Rupert Garcia brings to mind mid-twentieth-century icons of black servitude, characters that hovered in representational limbo between slavery and full equality. In Garcia’s hands, this character type is transformed into a symbol of defiance, self-determination, and resistance.
“Defiance, self-determination, and resistance.” That’s inspirational!
I saw “No More o’ This Shit” for the first time in the pages of the Washington City Paper - the paper reprinted it in its listings for a show (I presume at the National Gallery? I don’t recall). I carefully scissored it out of the paper, and pinned it to the pinboard in my assigned library carrell, and there it sat for a few years - looking back at me as I researched and composed and ultimately defended my dissertation.
When I left Washington, D.C., for my first job in academia (outside of Boston), I packed it up. I think I still have the little newspaper clipping image somewhere, but I did not think it appropriate to display in my new office. Even today, it dances on the line of exposing and subverting racism, but also reperforming (or platforming) racism. It makes a white guy like me uneasy - which, of course, is the primary intention of its message - at the same time as I find it inspiring.
Like all great art, it communicates much latent depth and meaning, and it successfully moves its audience from one place to another. I see it now, and it has additional meaning - it’s attached in my memory to the personal achievement of completing that doctoral dissertation in 2001.