Sketch Artist 
Shock Therapy
Austin painter Michael Ray Charles’s incendiary racial stereotypes are anathema to the politically correct. But he believes that his art can heal.
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Charles recalls being welcomed by one member of the art faculty with the remark, “I’ve got a bet that you won’t make it.” But for the most part, he remembers the awkward silences that greeted his work throughout the three years he spent earning his MFA. During the routine faculty-student critiques, he says, “I’d give my spiel on what this work is about. No one would say anything. Nothing. I always felt the professors had a hard time dealing with the content of my work. So I closed my door and just painted. I guess it was out of the realization that no matter how hard I tried, I’d always be”—he pauses, choosing his words—“the token black, perhaps?”
During Charles’s first year in graduate school, a friend had given him an antique Little Black Sambo figurine, which he promptly “tossed in a corner.” Discovering it a few months later while cleaning his room, he made it the subject of a drawing, Proudly Man-U-Factored in the USA, a disquieting vision of wide-eyed Sambos perched like oversized hood ornaments on bassinets moving along a factory assembly line. The picture haunted him so much that he started researching Sambo’s origins and history, eventually collecting old advertising placards featuring Sambo fronting for products like Watermelon Treats and Sambo Chocolate Malted Milk. “I discovered how the Sambo image developed out of the black minstrel shows, how the minstrel shows evolved into Barnum and Bailey and into the entertainment industry, how sports have become a form of the entertainment industry,” he says. “I started to see the similarities between the present and past, how those images have been repackaged and recast. People say those stereotypes don’t exist anymore. But the image is more sophisticated now, just as discrimination is more sophisticated now. We’re not looking at grotesque caricatures anymore. We’re looking at Deion Sanders smiling next to a Pepsi can.”
Armed with and alarmed by that insight, Charles began to revisit the old stereotypes and literally draw the connections between past and present. His paintings, scraped to resemble peeling antique advertising placards, presented his own bitingly satirical campaign for a fictitious, amorphous product called Forever Free, in essence a complex symbol of how the promises of freedom—and the free market—have often seduced and abandoned African Americans. And to pitch it he employed a troupe of spokespersons created by merging stereotypes old and new: a pickaninny with bleached-blond hair, gang-bangers, Aunt Jemimas, a Sambo wearing a jester’s cockscomb hat and munching on a basketball. Liberty-Perm Products, the equally fictitious manufacturer of Forever Free, soon metamorphosed into the Liberty Bros. Permanent Daily Circus, a showcase for a series of alternately menacing and pathetic freaks including Handini the escape artist, his face wrapped in chains and locked by a “Masta Lock,” and Payback the Clown, his hand out, a baseball bat behind his back. Charles glues his personal trademark to these paintings: a Lincoln penny, a symbol of his token status as well as a commentary on the value of emancipation without economic integration.
In an era of art that is almost painfully politically correct, Charles’s aggressive yet accessible imagery and flip, sophisticated wordplay got instant attention. Betty Moody, one of Houston’s most respected contemporary-art dealers, gave him a one-man show right after he got his MFA in 1993. Participation in the Phoenix Triennial that year brought a call from New York dealer Tony Shafrazi, a major player in the SoHo art scene, who offered him a one-man show—an annual occurrence since—over the phone. After buying a Charles from one of Shafrazi’s shows, Spike Lee also phoned, leading to Charles’s designing a poster for Four Little Girls, Lee’s documentary about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
Not all African Americans have been as favorably impressed. “A lot of blacks have problems with my work,” Charles admits. Indeed, there have been rumblings in advance of the Blaffer show. “What I’ve heard is that people are saying the images are so damaging they shouldn’t be used at all,” says Blaffer Gallery director Don Bacigalupi. And although Charles originally directed his work to a black audience, he has few black collectors. “I can count on one hand the blacks who have bought my paintings,” he says. “I’m challenging the idea of what black identity is. And I think some people have a problem when things don’t look the way they would prefer them to look.” White audiences, though less inclined to wince at first glance, should also find an unpleasant dose of self-recognition that goes far beyond their stereotypical guilt. There’s a strikingly color-blind universality to Charles’s vision of the amoral, bottom line—driven economic coercion—the dark side of All-American corporate capitalism—that spawned his black-faced stereotypes; Charles’s bleached-blond pickaninny is peering out of the same mirror as the fifty-year-old white male contemplating cosmetic surgery in order to keep his position in middle management.
While Charles has a keen sense of the ambiguities and ironies inherent in his work, he has an unambiguous conviction that the failure of frank racial dialogue in the present is setting us up for trouble in the future. “We don’t really talk about the things we need to talk about,” he says. “We’re moving farther away from sitting at the table, talking face to face.” The consequences, he believes, won’t be so much a race war as a retreat into an intensified version of the icy separateness he remembers from his childhood, a society where the “hidden conversation” of racism proceeds with the kind of vicious undercurrents he illustrates in The Deadly Parallel, a truly horrifying image of two snarling clowns, human-beast hybrids in camouflage makeup, facing off on the “United Country Grounds.”
But such visions don’t disturb the determined equanimity of the young man who labors away in his suburban cul-de-sac, teaching two days a week as an assistant professor at the University of Texas, welcoming his four-year-old son, Alex, home from preschool in the afternoon, occasionally flying off to New York to keep up with his increasingly profitable business there. But he doesn’t equate the bottom line with success. “For me, wealth is the opportunity to be influential in my children’s lives,” Charles says. “To use my talents without hurting anyone else. To be a good person. I had that kind of wealth before I started selling my paintings, so I’m not buying into anyone else’s idea of happiness or success. I think it’s important to define those things for yourself.”
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