Try as you might, with a career spanning over 50 years, international acclaim, and a host of prestigious awards, it’s hard to imagine McColl Center residency alumnus Mark Steven Greenfield, as anything other than an artist. And yet, in a purely hypothetical parallel universe, you might have come to know him as a high school history teacher.
In some ways, Greenfield’s work feels like both a visual extraction and expansion of lesser-known historical narratives. In this regard, the painter transforms from figurative artist to documentarian, recording and archiving the untold.
Greenfield notes that his participation in McColl Center’s artist residency in 2016 not only provided him the space and opportunity to expand his artistic practice but also allowed him to bear witness to the city’s bleak political climate and distill his own accounts of current events. Just a few months into the residency, Charlotte was reeling from the killing of Keith Lamont Scott and the subsequent failure to hold the officers involved to account. In the midst of protests, curfews, and multiangular commentary, the artist was to create a piece that would reflect the moment.
The Charlotte Observer, a painting made for the century-old publication of the same name, features an egun—an entirely opaque figure inspired by African spiritual traditions. As an ancestral advisor or mediator, the egun is centrally positioned, its face shaded by a beaded curtain. A single lens from a pair of sunglasses rests over one eye, symbolizing watchfulness or observation, perhaps from an outsider’s perspective. The figure’s arms cross over its chest, each hand wielding a megaphone, equally distributing the input and output of the chaos reflected in the painting’s background. “In this case, you have the police and you had the people who are demonstrating,” says Greenfield. “Everybody wants to be heard. And everybody needs to be heard. That's what those megaphones were about.”
Fortunately, Greenfield’s time as a McColl Center resident proved to be more than just a reverberation of communal unrest. The artist who has participated in several similar programs throughout his career has always viewed residencies as a chance to reset his practice.
“Residencies for me have always been a way of recalibrating yourself,” he shares. “McColl[Center] was really important because I had just retired from the Cultural Affairs Department for the City of Los Angeles. It really afforded me an opportunity to refine my chops, get back into the swing of things. It was a turning point for me in a lot of respects.
According to Greenfield, the residency had also come at the perfect time. After receiving a large-scale commission from the Los Angeles Transit Authority, the artist was in need of a much bigger production space than his current studio could provide. Even more than space, the residency provided connection, which was as Greenfield puts it, “was the drawing point for the whole residency.”
“It's something that just happens kind of organically, where you realize that you're[all] in the same really magical space where you’re [all] stimulated to create and the energy is intoxicating, and you want more of it,” he expands.
Raised in the Catholic church—though he now emphasizes his detachment from its dogma—Greenfield remains drawn to its display of ritual and ceremony. The time spent at McColl Center, as well as in other residencies, often brings the ritual of breaking bread with others, a practice Greenfield reveres. This act of shared connection parallels other rituals in his life, such as his 40-year-long meditation practice, and the use of mantras, which manifest throughout his art.
In particular, the HALO and Black Madonna series feature the repetition of tondos, in dividually drawn circles meant to serve as “visual identifiers” for mantras of Greenfield’s invention, a singular vibration that ties the portraits together. Both collections call upon traditional religious iconography, and reinvent that iconography as a means of protection for history’s most vulnerable. The works safeguard the histories and posterity of Black people, while in the background, white supremacists meet their fate in scenes of violent retribution, emphasizing that in this retelling, justice is indeed won.
