Word: postered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...small controversy erupted in Lowell House last week, when house resident Mellody R. Hayes '99 issued a complaint about a poster hanging in the serving area of her dining hall. Hayes and some members of the dining hall staff found the poster, which depicts several black figures carrying watermelon and other fruit above their heads, offensive. "The poster was racist," Hayes said. "It was building on stereotypes of black people enjoying watermelon...
Although the poster in question had been hanging in Lowell House for at least four years, its placement was inconspicuous and the students and tutors I spoke with said they barely ever noticed it. But when people began to complain, the poster was immediately replaced with an innocuous watercolor. As Lowell House Master William H. Bossert '59 explained to me, there was no need to have a poster that offended somebody hanging in the dining hall, especially one without any monetary value...
Lowell House's removal of the poster was certainly a sensitive response, and arguably the right one because, perhaps, the context in which the print was displayed was inappropriate. But it is more difficult to argue, as Hayes and others do, that the poster's content is racist, particularly without considering the identity of the artist...
...dining hall manager would not allow me to see the poster without proper authorization from the Assistant Director for House Dining, who was unlisted. Why, despite the fact that the print had been hanging in the dining hall every day for the last few years, has it now become a source of worry for those involved...
...wonder how Fritzner Alphonse, the artist who painted the original of which the Lowell House poster is a print, would feel that his work is now "off-limits." Who is Fritzner? It turns out that he is a Haitian folk artist who was born on July 18, 1938 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was leather tanner, like his father before him, until 1972, when at the age of 34 he painted his first tableau. He has been an artist ever since. Fritzner is part of a generation of Haitian artists to be influenced by the Centre d' Arte, which...