Boston Globe feature: 5 outstanding art-school grads for 2020
This article was originally published in the Boston Globe on May 7, 2020. By Cate McQuaid.
Charles Suggs
Video art, Boston University
Suggs’s split-screen video “Shadrach” revolves around Shadrach Minkins, a Black man who escaped slavery and settled in Boston. In 1851, police enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act seized him at work.
The video chillingly interleaves Minkins’s story with contemporary images of violence and prejudice. Suggs’s drawing of a poster cautioning “Colored People of Boston” shares a screen with a present-day warning about ICE raids.
Suggs, 53, loves finding little known stories. “It’s easy for these crimes against Black people to be just buried away,” he said.
The video features the artist’s hand-drawn, printed, and digital animations. Some of the drawings and prints are in his thesis show. The handmade aesthetic anchors Shadrach’s tale in a bleached-away past.
Until the end.
When Minkins was being tried, “A group of Black workers from the dock burst into the courthouse and dragged him out,” Suggs said. He went to Montreal via the Underground Railroad. Then, in the video, Minkins flushes with color.
The artist applied to BU after years of working at MIT as an administrative assistant. “I was feeling restless,” he said. “I want to do this, why am I not? I want to be a professional artist.”