Color of transit
Eyedrum show examines race and public transportation
Public transportation is a powerful set piece in the South’s civil rights history, as Rosa Parks’ symbolic battle aboard a Montgomery bus attests.
And since Parks’ time, there are still few places where various classes, ages and races mix so aggressively.
Not so in Atlanta, where a continuing separation of the races is often reaffirmed on the city’s mass transit, filled with black faces and only the rare glimpse of a white one.
That racial division was something artist Edward Epstein noticed immediately when he moved with his wife from San Antonio to Atlanta in 2000 and began riding MARTA.
“In Chicago ... everyone used the El and even the bus was quite diverse. When we arrived in Atlanta, we settled in Decatur, partly because it was right on the MARTA line. With a stop on the town square, I expected everyone to be on the train, but I was surprised at how few whites used it to commute to work every day.”
Epstein, who has since moved to Philadelphia, has created a provocative commentary on how race still divides by focusing on MARTA in a body of work called Non-Colored People, which will be on view at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery beginning Sept. 6.
Some of the passengers in Epstein’s Non-Colored People series are drawn in black ink and then filled in with a wash of color. Others are left empty and ghostlike next to the more fully detailed “colored” people. Epstein intends his work, which uses colored ink to play with the idea of race, as a commentary upon our own tendency to place non-Caucasians into distinct categories.
Within Epstein’s nicely melancholy work is a bitter truth that all of the city’s progress suddenly backslides on MARTA and in Atlanta’s car-dependent culture, which keeps the races segregated. In the central image of Non-Colored People, the white passengers are as spectral as ghosts next to the filled-in lines of the black riders.
Epstein first started to sketch public transportation passengers while an undergraduate at Yale, when he frequently traveled from New Haven into New York City on Metro North. His casual sketching continued whenever he would travel, on a bus in Israel, on the train in Chicago and then on MARTA. “I had never thought to make these personal notes into a finished body of work,” he confesses.
But riding MARTA, Epstein began to notice odd patterns.
“Almost all of the east-west riders were black,” Epstein says. “There were a few more white riders on north-south trains, mostly headed to the airport. Soon I put this together with information about the racial politics of the system, how the suburban counties declined to be part of it, how when the system was first built, some whites joked that the acronym stood for ‘Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.’”
Epstein was also influenced by his wife, Marybeth Gasman, an academic at Georgia State, whose work focuses on black colleges. Epstein found that meeting her students and colleagues or accompanying her on a study abroad trip to South Africa opened his eyes even more to the subject of race.
“All of these experiences have made me more aware of how color divides people,” admits Epstein.
But beyond the subject of race, the drawings also highlight the vulnerability of its human subjects, who are often engaged in extremely private reveries in the most public of spaces. Epstein manages to capture a kind of loneliness-amidst-crowds that city life can inspire, when even the heat of a hundred warm bodies intensifies an existential chill.
“Part of my initial attraction to public transportation as a theme was the contrast of mundane and exotic. Coming from a relatively sheltered life in the suburbs, I was always fascinated by the sideshow aspect of the subway riders with piercings and tattoos in odd places, outlandish hairdos and street entertainers performing for spare change,” says Epstein.
“But I’ve come to realize that what’s most remarkable are the faces and gestures of ordinary people: a person half asleep, slumped over in an awkward pose and buffeted by the motion of the train; a momentary glance, a stare, a frown; a rider barking into a cell phone; a person lost in a novel or a newspaper or just lost in thought. Capturing those things is a big part of what the work is about.”
The solitude in crowds and the continuing distance that racism creates between people — two fascinating themes intersect in Epstein’s haunting drawings.