CIVIL UNREST, be it a peaceful march or a fiery riot, can stoke artistic creativity. You can turn to Rep. John Lewis’s latest book in his great “March” graphic-novel trilogy, or tune in to Prince’s new, put-the-funk-in-protest-politics song, “Baltimore.”
The turmoil in Baltimore, in fact, has inspired numerous visual artists in recent days, including editorial cartoonists and illustrators.
Longtime Baltimore Sun cartoonist Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher — who picked up the 2015 Herblock Prize on Thursday night at the Library of Congress — draws upon his decades in Charm City to deliver local cartoons imbued with depth of civic understanding. That has included a cartoon this week that dug into the city’s deeper contributing ills.
“You accumulate wisdom over the decades, and call upon it” during events like the Freddie Gray case, Kal tells The Post’s Comic Riffs, citing the protests, riots and criminal charges filed against six Baltimore officers after Gray, 25, died from severe spinal injuries sustained while in police custody.
“I’ve been watching urban decay and America’s problems for several decades,” says Kal, a native of Norwalk, Conn. “But starting in 1988, I was out of the country for 11 years, in England, and living there, you could see everything [back here] in stronger relief.”
“There was a sliver of hope then that seems to have been extinguished … ,” Kal continues. “Amid the recessions, there was always this feeling like: We’re on the right track — just keep on trying to touch it. It was not a complete house of cards. and there were a lot of encouraging things.”
Kal still sees positive signs, but by and large, he says, those get “zero attention from the media.” And he doesn’t diminish the city’s collective morale amid the unrest.
“We got a body blow on this one,” Kal tells me. “It’s like the city was mugged, and it was a setback. It was sad.
“But then you think: What can we do?” continues Kal, illuminating the thinking that went into his cartoon “Band-Aid on a Volcano” with its accumulation of burning social issues.”I heard some of the rhetoric from politicians, and I just was feeling: ‘Whoa, we need more than just rhetoric.’ ”
[Baltimore riots: 8 eye-catching cartoons on tragedy and its latest raging aftermath]
“I didn’t want this to be a negative cartoon — the feeling that nothing can be done,” Kal tells me. “I see the role of the cartoonist as tough love. And the cartoon embodies the issues so people who are voiceless would look at it and say: ‘Yes! That’s what it it is.’ ”
And as civic-minded cartoonist, the balance of the role can be tricky.
“You can sound like you’re talking yourself too seriously, so you deal with it with humor,” Kal says. “I’ve got a combination of things at my disposal: I have this incredibly powerful art form. … You’ve got more eyeballs, so you have a great forum so you can say all this stuff. I try to be a leading voice in the conversation that I hope, in the long run, can ignite change.”
Another political cartoonist who draws often about urban concerns is Darrin Bell, who on Thursday was announced as the winner of the 2015 RFK Award for Cartoons, for a portfolio that largely focused on police and race.
Bell, whose comic strip “Candorville” offered especially thoughtful commentary on the death of Trayvon Martin, is gifted at illuminating the lives of victims.
“Freddie Gray wasn’t perfect. He’d had run-ins with the law,” Bell tells Comic Riffs. “But he had just as much potential as anyone to turn his life around. His story was far from over.
“And then he ran into some cops who arrested him forcefully, even though they admitted he’d surrendered peacefully,” the California-based cartoonist continues. “And once in their custody, his life ended either because they were negligent or because they were malicious — but either way, it’s because they treated him like an animal.
One in a series of his Baltimore cartoons shows a graveyard in which each headstone reads, “R.I.P. Freddie Gray.” “The tombstone cartoon points out,” Bell tells me, “that Freddie Gray is far from the only person whose story was prematurely cut short by the police.”
Any Bell cartoon delivers its satiric message in the form of a newspaper. “The Low-Expectation Times cartoon,” he says, “points out that it was actually breaking news that a prosecutor unequivocally stated it’s wrong for the police to treat any human being as if he’s cattle.
“The real story, in my mind, was that it made the news at all,” Bell continues. “The cops aren’t supposed to treat us like cattle. The [police’s] not treating us like cattle is supposed to be so routine that we don’t even notice it. Black and brown people have known for decades that any encounter with police — whether it’s Freddie Gray’s peaceful surrender to the police or Floyd Dent being pulled over for running a stop sign — could result in us being hogtied or killed, and that it shouldn’t be that way.
“We’re not supposed to feel like it’s Christmas whenever the State realizes it, too.”
As art director of The New Yorker, Francoise Mouly often commissions politically pointed covers, including illustrations of a recent black-and-white-divided St. Louis Gateway Arch; a Redskins Thanksgiving dinner; and a pencil-topped Eiffel Tower after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
For this week’s cover, “Injustice: Baltimore, 2015,” Mouly wanted another striking pictorial concept, and liked what artist/designer Peter Mendelsund delivered.
This week’s New Yorker cover, in response to the turmoil in Baltimore. (by Peter Mendelsund / used by permission of The New Yorker)
“Mendelsund doesn’t use words, but it’s powerful as an idea-picture … ,” Mouly tells The Post. “It allows for ambiguities, and has nice, elegant, almost mathematical little cues that are complex, but have such impact when used well.”
Mouly absolutely allows for the fact that an image can be open to varying interpretations.
“If you look at this image of Mendelsund’s, it just really explodes things in many directions,” Mouly tells me. “I was asked: ‘Don’t you think some people are going to see that as black people destroying America, and that somehow the looters are attacking America, because you’re talking about a broken flag?’ The interesting thing is that, sure, someone can project that reading onto the image.
“Or you can project onto it the way I read it: That the voice of the looters is shattering this very fragile veneer of unity — and that what is underneath is actually deeply broken. And it’s an issue of class more than of race, and we are shielded from seeing what’s behind it.
In this openness to interpretations, though, Mouly sees the artwork as a star-spangled Rorschach test. And she likens this multiplicity to a recent Jimmy Margulies editorial cartoon.
“It’s the same [larger] event,” Mouly says, “but parts of the population are saying, ‘Again?’ over different elements.
“The cartoon acknowledges that there is not a shared reality.”
