A Painter Is Celebrating the Blue-Collar Workers of Princeton University by Hanging Their Portraits Across Campus Walls

Hanging on the walls of most
university buildings are portraits of aged white men—deans, donors,
and illustrious alumni. But at Princeton right now, you’re more
likely see portraits of the people who do the daily work of
actually running the place: the cooks, cleaners, and security
guards.

These are the works of Mario
Moore, a 32-year-old Detroit-born artist who recently painted a
series of portraits honoring the African American service workers
on the Princeton campus, where he has just completed a year-long fellowship. The project
was inspired by Moore’s father, a former security guard at the
Detroit Institute of Arts who had a “hard-working, industrial
belt-type of mentality,” according to Moore.

In fact, Moore portrayed another
security guard for his 2019 portrait The Center of Creation
(Michael), which
shows the man inviting visitors into Princeton’s University Art
Museum through an open elevator door. It was one of several of
Moore’s works to be acquired by the same museum for its permanent
collection.  

“The museum bought that piece,
and Michael works there,” the artist tells Artnet News. “He’s going to be guarding his own
painting!”

Moore arrived on campus late in the summer of
2018. One of the first people he met was Clyde, who worked in the
facilities department at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, an
encounter that led to Clyde Sky High, Moore’s first painting in the
series.

“I just saw him walking by and I was like, ‘Hey,
do you know where I can get my hair cut?’” he recalled, noting the
difficulty of finding a black barbershop in the suburbs of New
Jersey. They struck up a
conversation, then set a time to meet again later, at which point
Moore started sketching Clyde in a notepad. 

This is how it went for all the
portraits: a chance meeting or introduction would give way to
longer sit-down conversations about life, then Moore would make a photo
or drawing of his subjects for reference and get to work.
Throughout the painting process, he would invite his subjects to
weigh in on the piece. Often, they became friends.

When Moore met
Valeria, a cook who’s
worked for over 40 years at the school, he learned that her
favorite hobby was to wash and wax her car. The resulting portrait,
one of the best of the bunch, features her in the parking lot of a
verdant park, leaning proudly against her red sedan. The
eight-foot-tall painting is now hanging in Rocky-Mathey dining
hall, where she works. 

“Thinking about representation
and how black people are depicted in films and images through
service roles—I didn’t want to perpetuate that as being normative,”
says Moore. “I was like, ‘How to do I reconcile that while honoring
the honesty of hard-working people who pay the bills this
way?’” 

That’s why there are no other
people depicted the background of the paintings, he says. “I didn’t
want the figures to seem like they’re serving someone
else.”

Last September, after Moore’s
residency ended, the Lewis Center mounted a solo show of his
portraits at Princeton. At the opening, he staged a performance
wherein several singers were dressed up as security guards. One of
the performers, who is also an artist, told Moore about his
experience in costume that night: “Before he sang, people would walk past him and
never say anything,” Moore said. “Some handed him trash to throw
away.” 

“At the end of the performance,
they walked up to the singer and apologized.”

The post A Painter Is Celebrating the Blue-Collar Workers of
Princeton University by Hanging Their Portraits Across Campus
Walls appeared first on artnet News.