In Compton, Telling a Visual Story of Struggle: A Conversation with Fulton Leroy Washington

Abstract

In Compton, Telling a Visual Story of StruggleA Conversation with Fulton Leroy Washington Karlos K. Hill (bio) BEARING WITNESS In his new column, appearing in every other issue, Karlos K. Hill highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice. Click for larger view View full resolution FULTON LEROY WASHINGTON (AKA MR. WASH), EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION (2014)/COURTESY OF THE ARTIST/ARTBYWASH.COM The story of how Fulton Leroy Washington became an internationally acclaimed artist is intertwined with the story of how he earned his freedom. Convicted in 1997 of a crime that he didn’t commit, then given a mandatory life sentence because of his prior arrests for a series of nonviolent drug offenses, Washington served more than twenty years in federal prison before being granted clemency by President Barack Obama in 2016. To this day, he maintains that his painting Emancipation Proclamation, which features President Obama signing an order to release him from prison, helped pave the way for the ultimate commutation of his sentence. Now a free man, Fulton Washington is electrifying the art world with his innovative approach to art, including, most recently, digital art. In July 2021 UCLA’s Hammer Museum awarded him the prestigious Mohn Public Recognition Award for his series of portraits of American presidents, celebrities, and former fellow inmates featuring oversized teardrops. In a recent interview, I asked Washington about the role of art in helping him gain his freedom and his hope for clearing his name, as well as his moving vision for building a community art center in Compton. Karlos K. Hill: Your artwork is ground-breaking in so many ways. I’m thinking especially about your signature “teardrop” series, and the way the tears in the paintings often contain a story within a story. You are innovative not only in your artwork itself but also in terms of the conversation between your art and technology. On a deeper level, your artwork actually helped you secure your freedom. You leveraged your creative ability in a way that enabled you to gain the attention of the Obama administration, and from there, with the help of your lawyers and a number of intermediaries, you were able to walk out of prison a free man. Can you talk a bit about the ways in which art has helped you to liberate yourself? Not just literally, as in your liberation from prison, but also spiritually and emotionally. What was the significance of art in that process? Fulton Leroy Washington: Art became a way of communication for me in prison—a way to tell the story when I couldn’t find the words to say. It became a permanent record in history and time of what I was going through. It’s not so much that I was afraid of dying by incarceration, but there [End Page 30] were so many other things in there that could take your life. And I don’t mean you’d be sitting in there for seventy or eighty years waiting to get old and die. I wanted to tell the next generation the story of the fight, the struggle, so that it would not be tainted with words that might create a different picture. So I was liberated by having that opportunity and the ability to capture that moment in time. I used the journey that I went through, through the criminal justice system and trying to prove my innocence and gain my freedom, to document as many aspects as I could of every court experience. I use art in that way to tell a visual story of a struggle. Many other people were living through the same thing, but those people had no avenue to communicate what was really going on. When the media come through the prison, everything tends to be sanitized, and everybody’s cautioned to be on their best behavior. Everyone’s cleaned up and dressed up, wearing decent clothes and trying to stay out of the way. That’s the sanitized version for the public, but it’s not the reality of what’s going on. So I use art to convey a little snippet...