Michael Ray Charles

born 1967

Biography(b Lafayette, LA, 1967).
African American painter. Charles graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA, in 1985, having studied advertising design, illustration, and painting. He received his MFA from the University of Houston in 1993, and subsequently taught at the University of Texas at Austin. His paintings, which manipulate images of historical black stereotypes, have generated critical controversy and hostile reactions from viewers. Charles, however, saw himself as investigating these images and their place in American history, exploring and exposing their negativity. He typically signs his work with an actual copper penny, oriented to display the profile of Abraham Lincoln.

Charles also collected black memorabilia, such as Aunt Jemima dolls and other advertising ephemera, and has researched 19th-century blackface and minstrelsy performers. Some of his most controversial figures have been of childhood literary icons, including a black Sambo reminiscent of Mickey Mouse. Charles is interested in how these images remain in America’s collective memory, and the different attitudes of Caucasians and African Americans when viewing them. He creates extreme caricatures, such as a sinister-looking black face with a watermelon slice for a mouth and black seeds instead of teeth—images meant to stimulate thought. The faces in his paintings confront the viewer with their oversized scale, some of them more than 1 m high. Charles felt that American advertising conditioned people of all types to pigeonhole blacks as representing the body (instead of the mind), and as entertainers—and that these stereotypical attitudes have been retained in the American psyche. To emphasize this point, Charles juxtaposed African American celebrities with advertising imagery, such as Oprah Winfrey as a cookie-jar mammy figure.

Many of Charles’s paintings have an antique aura and resemble vintage posters, including a series of paintings on paper of black figures titled Before Black and After Black, with the former seemingly situated in the 19th century and the latter in the present day. The figures in both are doomed by their blackness. Like Charles’s work inspired by circus posters, this series has an antique source, the lithographs of CURRIER & IVES. This print shop’s scenes of Americana offered several categories, including “Darktown” with racist depictions of blacks that were intended to be humorous.

Charles’s paintings scathingly address issues of identity that concern postmodern art and society. Similar to the life-size silhouettes of KARA WALKER, Charles’s paintings ridicule the “romance” of the Old South and black subservience. By situating viewers in an historical continuum, Charles is able to emphasize the extreme nature of racist stereotypes, producing a sense of dissonance as viewers find themselves both repulsed and fascinated by the imagery. He has also worked in film, collaborating with Spike Lee on Bamboozled (2000), a version of Mel Brooks’s film The Producers (1968) in which a producer pitches the worst possible idea for a television program—a modern-day minstrel show with African American performers in blackface. Charles’s promotional poster featured a nappy-headed pickaninny.

The art market has favored African American artists such as Charles whose work “promotes” racial stereotypes even though the artists’ purpose is ironic. As Richard Schur wrote,
Infused with humor and irony, the work of these artists question realism… they demonstrate how previous generations relied on overdetermined poses or models to create their art and question how traditional notions of art and beauty have perpetuated racial inequality. This ironic mode of representing black bodies has been popular with white collectors and thus has been problematic for African Americans because it frequently invokes stereotypes to de-bunk them, and such images have been a bit too popular with white audiences.
Charles has had solo exhibitions in the United States, France, and Belgium, and has served as a juror on the Austin Arts in Public Places committee. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Austin Museum of Art and other institutions. [Sandra Sider. "Charles, Michael Ray." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2094115.]

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