Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie

“Three deliberate grays for Freddie” is a piece of art created by artiste Steve Locke at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to honor Freddie Gray. The piece of art focused on addressing the issues of violence and race in contemporary America. The abstract portrait created by Locke represented Gray, a Black American man, aged 25 years who died on April 19th, 2015, a week after he was rushed to the hospital due to fatal spinal cord injury under custody in Baltimore police. Gray’s death brought about racial tensions in the city and led to violence, police clashes, and protests. A wide range of discrepancies existed between recollections of witnesses and official police narrative. The police claimed that Gray had a knife and resisted arrest. Civil rights advocates, on the other hand, alleged police brutality.

Locke’s relief carving was a contribution to the ongoing Modernism revision as a movement unaffiliated to political engagement. The artist developed three distinct monochromes using digital tools for the façade installation, by averaging three of Gray’s photos that were frequent in various media channels (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2018). Among the three photos, one was Gray’s image in the hospital on life support, one from his arrest, and the other was a family photo. The resulting colors in the portrait illustrated Gray’s timeline of his life, suffering, and death. Locke created the monochromes by averaging colors in the pixels of every image and used the resulting colors to translate Gray’s life in the street corner, arrest, and hospital. The application of “gray” in the language of painting, was used to name any color resulting from a mixture of primary colors. In this sense, Locke’s idea of gray was chromatic, rather than simply a mixture of white and black.

Reference

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. (2018). Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray). Retrieved from https://www.stevelocke.com/three-deliberate-grays-for-freddie