Michael Ray Charles: Singing Satire

The Public Broadcasting Service(PBS) has been a proponent of quality television for the past 50 years.  Its nonprofit organization and the programming the station provides are truly unique in the world of television, and no other network is like PBS.  The station has also advocated and popularized contemporary art with the success of their series Art21.  One of the show’s first profiled artists was Michael Ray Charles, whose well-known social commentary pieces play on the portrayal of race in America, simultaneously displaying humor and criticism with ease.

According to the Art21 official website, Michael Ray Charles was born in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1967.  He continued living in Louisiana while he was in college, studying advertising design and illustration before eventually shifting his focus to painting.

This is the medium which made him famous, and he graduated from McNeese State University in 1985 before receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Houston in 1993.  Today, he still works in Texas and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin, a city known for its rich artistic community.

The paintings Charles produces often have the recurring theme of satirical minstrel shows.  Minstrel shows were a popular theater performance type in the 19^th century. The shows portrayed black people with heavy-handed racist stereotypes.  They were often performed by white people dressed in black face. This was done as an effort to mimic black people, portraying them as being stupid, clumsy buffoons who simply played music and drifted through life.

Charles’ paintings often depict black people in a minstrel light while parodying big-name brand advertisements.  This shows the degradation of black people’s images through the stereotypes used to advertise products, and these pieces often evoke a sense of irony and sarcasm that is easy for the viewer to understand.  There are several excellent examples of these paintings that can be found simply by searching Charles’ name in Google.

One painting shows a black baby on all fours, positioned to look like a child’s doll, with “Toys R Us” emblazoned across the top, a joke about the famous toy company.  Another more damning mockery of a major company shows a grinning black man’s face sandwiched between the text “Tommy Hillnigguh” written in the same typeface as fashion company Tommy Hilfiger.  Another piece which makes fun of the NBA shows a black man eating a basketball as if it were a watermelon, an old staple of minstrel shows, with the lines “Life’s A Ball/Eat It Up” above and below him.  To illustrate Charles’ point, the painting includes a skewed representation of the NBA’s logo in the bottom right corner.

Satirical art is an excellent form of expressing contempt, and Michael Ray Charles is an expert at this style.  His catalogue of work includes parodies of all realms of consumerism and culture, and his signature minstrel-themed style underscores his ironic opinions.  According to the Internet Movie Database, Charles was even chosen by director Spike Lee as a creative consultant for his 2000 film “Bamboozled,” which centered on  minstrel show’s characters.  His expertise on mass media and American history make his art a commentary on contemporary cultural relations and how our country views race.

- Taylor Burns