The Cotton Bowl, from the series Strange Fruit,

2011

<p>This work relies on a tight linear geometry to draw a through line that connects the legacies of chattel slavery with today’s practice of using and abusing young black athletes. The field is bisected by a spray painted yard line, creating two seemingly distinct scenes. On the left side, the cotton patch is almost too orderly. The plants line up neatly, one in front of the other. In a real field, the plants would be much closer together, probably intertwined as well. They are almost perfectly parallel to the yard line. The figures themselves kneel in an unnaturally rigid way, as if these are not men to be warmly cared for and loved but rather cold tools to be used.</p> <p>The series title, <em>Strange Fruit</em>, is borrowed from a famous anti-lynching ballad written by Abel Meropool and performed in the 1930s by Billie Holiday, whose beautiful voice described the horrifying but frequent spectacle of lynching to the American public. She sang, “Southern trees bear strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” For Thomas, black bodies continue to be spectacles to this day. </p> <p><strong>Jamal Maddox<br>Princeton Class of 2017</strong><br>(prepared for the course AAS 349 / ART 364, Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery Across the Black Atlantic, Spring 2017)<br></p>

<p><strong>Student label, AAS 349 / ART 364, Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery Across the Black Atlantic, Spring 2017:</strong> </p> <p>What is the value of a black life? Thomas offers an answer in the sharp lines and bold contrasts of <em>The Cotton Bowl</em>. He places a sharecropper and a football player in the spaces in which they generate their “value” to American society. For the sharecropper, his worth is derived from every cotton plant he picks; for the football player, from every clearly marked yard line he gains. The limbs of both figures are defined by sharp, ninety-degree angles. This unnatural human geometry raises a critical question: are these men, or are they machines?</p> <p>The prominent presentation of cotton plants and the figure of the cotton picker allude to a painful chapter in African American history. By the beginning of the Civil War (1861–65), cotton had become synonymous with the institution of slavery. In its aftermath, the exploitation of African Americans took on a new form in the institution of sharecropping. Thomas deliberately placed a sharecropper—as opposed to an enslaved person—in this image. Chattel slavery may have disappeared, but for black tenant farmers oppression found new expression in the harsh economic conditions under which they labored and the racist Jim Crow laws under which they lived.<br>With the two figures mirroring each other, Thomas pulls this brutal history into the present. The football player is the sharecropper’s modern-day incarnation, a symmetry suggested by the work’s title. College football bowl games like the Allstate Rose Bowl generate massive amounts of wealth for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), but its mostly black players toil without pay. </p> <p><strong>Jamal Maddox<br>Princeton Class of 2017</strong></p>

In <em>The Cotton Bowl</em>, Thomas juxtaposes a cotton picker and a football player in mirrored poses, drawing parallels between two seemingly disparate yet intimately entwined forms of Black labor—cotton picking and contemporary professional sports. While cotton pickers were ruthlessly exploited by plantation owners during the Civil War and in the antebellum South,the strenuous work of Black athletes enriches multimillion-dollar corporations today. As Black athletes draw millions of viewers, cotton pickers were often the victims of public lynchings that attracted huge crowds of spectators. Both figures bear the burden of the commodification and objectification of Black male bodies.The comparison between the figures allowsThomas to suggestthat the ancestors and forbearersof the football player had been subjected to forced labor and lynching, andthat the cotton field later became the football field. <em>The Cotton Bowl</em> is part of Thomas’s series <em>Strange Fruit</em>, titled after the poem about lynching by Abel Meeropol and the song made famous by Billie Holiday. The series explores notions of spectacle and exploitation in relationto Black American identity.