Words of Hate, Transformed Through Art

What a story. An exhibit displaying some of this project’s artworks has apparently been around for well over a year, but I hadn’t heard about it until this morning. And I found reading this article — “Hate removed: White supremacist books transformed into art exhibit with positive messages” in the Missoulian — an emotional experience. I imagine you will too.

Short version: In 2003, a former white supremacist group member led Montana Human Rights Network director Ken Toole to a storage locker containing roughly 4,000 copies of hateful books by a white supremacist leader; the racist author Ben Klassen killed himself in 1993, but his hate raged on in those books. Faced with a decision about what to do with this stockpile of vitriol, the Montana Human Rights Network, the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, MT, and a group of artists decided to transform it — to use those books to fight the books’ own message:

Why not enlist artists to transform all that hate into something good? . . . Some artists pulped the pages of the books, completely remaking them into something altogether different. Others altered the texts more subtley. New York artist Charles Gute took pages of the books and marked them up, substituting words to create a whole reversal of the message. Faith Ringgold – a well-known African-American artist and writer whose work was featured at the Missoula Art Museum in 2007 – left out the books entirely, and instead wrote and illustrated a story about the first time she was ever called the “N” word.

And then one family of artists took the final few thousand books :

The result was “Hate Begins At Home,” a 10-by-10-foot house constructed largely out of the books – nearly 3,000 in all. Inside the house, a looping video shows Boussard painting words from the books onto her daughter’s back.

“What we wanted to do with the piece was speak to the idea that hatred and racism really does begin at home; you’re not born that way,” said Boussard. “A child is essentially an innocent mind, and it’s what happens with the family and peers that change innocence into prejudice.”

So very true. This issue of what we teach our children, the hate and bias and prejudice we pass on to them — and the love and openness we often discourage, whether intentionally or not – is something I’ve been talking to friends and family about for years. And what a powerful message this family is sending about this truth, with this art.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Photo of “ex-book” by Flickr user STML