Title : "In Mississippi in 1947, two Black teenagers asked for fried chicken and watermelon before they went to the electric chair. Professor Green painted one ornate platter for each boy."
link : "In Mississippi in 1947, two Black teenagers asked for fried chicken and watermelon before they went to the electric chair. Professor Green painted one ornate platter for each boy."
"In Mississippi in 1947, two Black teenagers asked for fried chicken and watermelon before they went to the electric chair. Professor Green painted one ornate platter for each boy."
From "Julie Green, Artist Who Memorialized Inmates’ Last Suppers, Dies at 60/For more than two decades, she rendered death row prisoners’ requests for a last meal on a series of plates, bringing a human face to capital punishment" (NYT).She planned to paint the meals until capital punishment was abolished, or until she had made 1,000 plates, whichever came first. In September, she painted her 1,000th plate, an oval platter with a single familiar image: the bottle of Coca-Cola requested by a Texas man in 1997. She died a few weeks later....
The plates are white china with the image of the food done in cobalt blue glaze. She got the idea to do this project when she read about a man whose last meal choice was glazed doughnuts. The obituary writer does not note the glaze/glaze inspiration/coincidence. It's just put there for us to see.
Nor does the obituary discuss race, even though — out of all those 1,000 plates — one of the choices it highlights is the fried chicken and watermelon that 2 black teenagers wanted. For many years, it has seemed verboten to mention fried chicken or watermelon in connection with black people. What is it about this context that made it seem okay?
Is it just that Julie Green — who looks white in the photograph — has died? Is it that she meant to express empathy for the condemned? But she systematically commemorated any condemned person who was given a meal choice. The obituary chose which examples to isolate. I was surprised to see this breach of taboo.
The author of the obituary is the NYT style writer Penelope Green. No relation to Julie Green, I presume. I see I have a tag for Penelope Green, and I see that I have especially enjoyed her writing — about Marie Kondo (here), Cat Marnell (here), and new urban communal living, blogged here: "And another thing I like about Penelope Green is: She put 'social justice' in quotes."
I wonder what Penelope Green really thought about Julie Green's art project. An obituary writer can't inject criticism. Or can she?
Thus articles "In Mississippi in 1947, two Black teenagers asked for fried chicken and watermelon before they went to the electric chair. Professor Green painted one ornate platter for each boy."
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