Juan Logan
Behind the mask and beyond the fear
Juan Logan recalls walking home one night in Baltimore past rows and rows of brownstone houses. Ahead of him walked a white man. When the other man turned around and saw Logan behind him, he began to run.
“I don’t want anything you have!” Logan shouted.
As Logan opened the front door to his home, the other man stopped running.
When the other man turned around and saw Logan behind him, he began to run.
Juan Logan is used to the fact that articles written about him will inevitably refer to him as a "Black artist.” Although his work often raises questions about race and inequality told from a Black perspective, he wants to make one thing very clear: We’re all in this together.
“The reality is that there are problems in this country. They are not my problems and they’re not your problems,” he says. “They’re our problems.”
Logan has been an artist for 42 years, ever since a high school shop teacher gave an assignment to make a 5-foot eagle out of pine wood.
“He said I could make it all my own — not like anybody else’s,” Logan says.
That eagle was his first sculpture and it launched a career spent grappling with difficult subject matter. Now a professor of art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Logan continues to create installations that poke at our discomfort, provoking us to recognize and respond.
“This is not about accusing anyone of anything. It’s about acknowledging it,” he says. “Regardless of where we are in this country, we have to acknowledge who we are and what we’ve been.”
Acknowledgement is complicated when a system doesn’t see all people equally, he adds.
“We have systematically set up this paradigm where fear is created without knowing anyone at all,” he says. “You can’t get past my Blackness or my sexuality. You can’t see me at all. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. Am I the safest man in America? Am I the most dangerous? You don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.”
Questions of identity are central to Logan’s installation titled Whose Song Shall I Sing? featuring a wall of masks — all of the same familiar face, Aunt Jemima — but in varied presentations.
“Regardless of where we are in this country, we have to acknowledge who we are and what we’ve been.”
It was a reaction to a research study stating that women and African-Americans receive lower-quality care from medical providers due to an unconscious bias. Logan equates this ingrained prejudice with blindness.
“Since the doctors couldn’t recognize my face or your face,” he says, “maybe they could recognize Aunt Jemima’s.”
But even Aunt Jemima has changed over the years. Logan points out that the original Jemima was very dark-skinned. The face staring out from syrup bottles today has a lighter complexion and straighter hair.
“So, maybe they won’t recognize the traditional Aunt Jemima either.”
The masks in Whose Song distort and alter the face, representing various African-American stereotypes. One wears a muzzle. One has the eyes removed. Some have no faces at all, but instead feature vaginas, symbolizing the hyper-sexualization of African-American women. There is an Uncle Tom mask, which Logan says is the safest because he is “old and impotent.”
Logan isn’t trying to give any answers — just raise questions that are deeply personal and profoundly universal.
“I’m talking about humanity here,” he says. “Does it matter that I’m Black or white? Or is it that these issues are important to all of us? Yes, they are my issues. But they are also your issues.”
Originally published by The Colorado Daily