Introduction

Thom Shaw, a Cincinnati-based artist, employs woodcut, pen-and ink drawing, and painting. He depicts himself vulnerably but also somewhat humorously confronting a life-threatening health problem in his series of Self-Portraits. And, in his long-running Malcolm X Paradox series, Shaw graphically and wrenchingly renders subjects of the inner-city.

Shaw’s form and expression—his frenetic use of line and black ink—seem apt for the life-threatening dilemmas confronted himself and his subjects. The artist combines with his strong sense of compositional design (a reflection of his commercial background in the graphic arts) an explicit iconography, and in some works, the use of billboard-like lettering. It is important to the artist that his message be very clear—in his words, “in your face.” Shaw distributes icons across his compositions, achieving an almost map-like symbolism. In the irony, despair and stark expression characteristic of his work, Shaw attributes the influence of German Expressionism and the work of artists such as Kathé Kollwitz and Ben Shahn.

Shaw’s introspective Self- Portraits are an outgrowth of the artist’s encounter with heart disease. He depicts his body as vulnerable—his skin splayed open, revealing his musculature—as if in an anatomical diagram. As a signature of the series—the center of the artist’s chest is emblazoned with the icon of a disembodied heart. Wires are hooked to Shaw’s torso; his body is, in effect, released to the embrace of medicine’s mysterious tentacles. In Wrestling with Principalities (2000), his half-naked body—resembling Christ’s before the cross—is held in a menacing vice-grip by the devil. While themes such as death and redemption seem to underlie this work—a reflection, no doubt, of the artist’s strong personal faith—the series is not without humor. Shaw depicts himself in Stent Transplant (2003), hooked up to wires, while holding a copy of Art in America. Hovering above the artist’s head is an abstract scramble of lines. In this way, Shaw denotes his temporary confusion regarding the incongruity of real life and death questions in the midst of an on-going career as an artist—one which is presumably reflective of the meaning of life, if not also the more pecuniary day-to-day concerns about sales, exhibitions, reviews, and art world status.

Over the last decade or so, Shaw has taken the pulse of the African-American commmunity and others in the inner-city, and he is not sanguine about their condition, although he is hopeful that his work might become a vehicle for social change. In Shaw’s The Malcolm X Paradox series, a result of more than a hundred hours of interviews conducted with gang members of different races and both genders, Shaw chronicles the breakdown of the family, drug abuse, and the perpetuation of violence both between males, and against women. In Poverty’s Paradise (2001), a woman with an angular, worn face shoots up while holding her baby. In The Malcolm X Paradox #1 (1991), one of the earliest works from this series, two young men—their arms intertwined—brutally shoot one another at point-blank range. If the severity of this latter image is relieved somewhat by the artist’s cartoon-like draftsmanship, its disturbing message is undiminished. Shaw notes that while the youths in this composition wear Malcolm X T-shirts, the historical significance of Malcolm X is sadly unknown to them. Thus, the “X” has become a retail commodity only, an empty signifier for many who would wear it. Shaw’s frequent use of the “X” on bodies throughout the series denotes, bleakly, the social cancellation of individual value.

Shaw, an African-American, does not sugar-coat his renderings. Some, in viewing this work have argued that Shaw’s harsh depictions either glamorize gang activity, or simply reify pervasive media imagery. Shaw intends to do neither. Rather, the artist wishes to impart his direct observation. If the artist may be said to focus on the negative, he calls attention to race and to suffocating urban conditions that have, in fact, largely disappeared from the media radar screen in recent years. Shaw undoubtedly lays a certain amount of the blame for the social dysfunction that he portrays at the doorstep of the minority community itself. But, to be sure, he does not absolve from responsibility the very mixed history of race relations in the U.S., nor, for that matter, the current social, political, and economic system.

Dan Younger
Director