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Master printmaker Curlee Raven Holton, professor of art and director of Lafayette’s Experimental Printmaking Institute, has created a limited-edition fine art print to celebrate and support the creation of a campus sculpture honoring the College’s first African American graduate, David Kearney McDonogh.
McDonogh, Class of 1844, was perhaps the first person with legal status as a slave ever to receive a college degree. The serigraph and relief print, entitled “Legacy” and produced in an edition of 100, “incorporates both historical and contemporary references and speaks to the importance of the relationship of Lafayette’s African American alumni to the College and larger issues of educational opportunities locally and nationally,” Holton says. The image size is 18 by 24 inches, the paper size 22 by 30 inches.
The purchase price of $1,000 will support the creation of the sculpture honoring McDonogh. For information on purchasing the print, contact the Experimental Printmaking Institute by phone, (610) 330-5592, or email, holtonc@lafayette.edu. The print will be shipped directly with a letter of provenance.
Lafayette has engaged internationally renowned sculptor Melvin Edwards to create a sculpture commemorating Lafayette’s granting of a degree to McDonogh. It will be “abstract and symbolic, massive and upward-reaching, representing struggle and tension and achievement,” Holton says.
“Think about the debate going on in the country when McDonogh was here! During this dialogue about the abolition of slavery, here he was at Lafayette, a slave, right in the middle of this advocacy to end slavery and change our social complexion,” Holton continues.
“You see this man saying, ‘I’m an American! I want to be a doctor, I don’t want to go to Liberia, to a colony for freed slaves.’ McDonogh was more than his owner perceived him to be, and that humanity came through at Lafayette. We still see first-generation college students here, and Lafayette still represents that same doorway to opportunity. This is a portal through which students walk and emerge as members of society, and we are the caretakers of that transition,” Holton says.
Edwards served as artist-in-residence at EPI in 2004-05, supported by Lafayette’s David L. Temple Sr. and Helen J. Temple Visiting Lecture Series Fund. His work has ranged from large outdoor public sculptures to small pieces in a series entitled Lynch Fragments, which he began 1963, taking on slavery, racism, and the African American experience.
“Mel Edwards is among a distinctive group of black artists who came of age during the waning years of the Jim Crow Era and the early morning light of the Civil Rights movement. . . .” wrote Clement Alexander Price, professor of history and director of the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University, Newark, for the Procuniar Workshop in New York City.
“At this juncture in our nation’s history, when we know more about the past than ever before, and when the moral challenges of the 20th century enable us to move beyond shock onto a higher plane of discovery and reconciliation, Mel Edwards is all the more important to our visual literacy,” Price said. “His images of hurt, oppression, defiance, and survival, images hammered into and out of metals and placed on paper, embrace a new way of knowing and feeling about what was formerly unspeakable.”