Leaving the Land of a Thousand Hills
By MICHAEL J. MASCARENHAS
Our two-week baseline assessment in Rwanda came to an end, and it was time for me to leave “the land of a thousand hills” and head back to New York. I have much data to sift through — my team interviewed 48 households, and collectively we surveyed 378 households in the three sectors. I leave the field with many research-type questions — more than when I entered. For example, how do we actually measure this complex activity known as water access in subsistence communities? I am also left wondering about the relationship between social inequality and environmental disparity, and the social impact that technological changes might bring about in these subsistence communities.
Like most of you, I want to see (and am happy to be a part of) improvements in water services in developing areas like rural Rwanda. Water for People, together with a large contingent of other nonprofit water development institutions, like WaterAid, Charity:Water and Water.org, to name only three, are engaged in various (and very successful) sponsorship drives, research initiatives and technological improvements to help water access. The objective of these organizations is to help provide those who, by virtue of where they live and who they are (poor, and lacking political power), do not have appropriate access to what many believe is a basic human right — water.
However, my fieldwork has also taught me that we should be cautious about the research methods and technological improvements introduced in the name of water aid and development. Technological improvements, even improved gravity-fed public taps, have impacts that are not always predictable or in the beneficiaries’ best interests in terms of stability and sustainability. Let me explain from the changes I have observed in farming practices where these new water technologies have been introduced.
This month, a painting by Picasso, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” became the most expensive painting ever sold at an auction when it exceeded expectations to fetch $106.5 million at Christie’s. In February, a sculpture by Giacometti, “Walking Man I,” sold for $104.3 million at Sotheby’s, setting the previous world record auction price.
ATLANTA — That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.
But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer.
On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders, including Dr. King.
“It is an amazing betrayal,” said Athan Theoharis, a historian at Marquette University who has written books about the F.B.I. “It really speaks to the degree that the F.B.I. was able to engage individuals within the civil rights movement. This man was so well trusted.”
From at least 1968 to 1970, Mr. Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to two F.B.I. agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site.
A clerical error appears to have allowed for Mr. Withers’s identity to be divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Mr. Withers and his informer number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several locations, the F.B.I. appears to have forgotten to hide them. The F.B.I. said Monday that it was not clear what had caused the lapse in privacy and was looking into the incident.
Civil rights leaders have responded to the revelation with a mixture of dismay, sadness and disbelief. “If this is true, then Ernie abused our friendship,” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a retired minister who organized civil rights rallies throughout the South in the 1960s.
Others were more forgiving. “It’s not surprising,” said Andrew Young, a civil rights organizer who later became mayor of Atlanta. “We knew that everything we did was bugged, although we didn’t suspect Withers individually.”
Many details of Mr. Withers’s relationship with the F.B.I. remain unknown. The bureau keeps files on all informers, but has declined repeated requests to release Mr. Withers’s, which would presumably explain how much he was paid by the F.B.I., how he was recruited and how long he served as an informer.
At the time of his death, Mr. Withers had the largest catalog of any individual photographer covering the civil rights movement in the South, said Tony Decaneas, the owner of the Panopticon Gallery in Boston, the exclusive agent for Mr. Withers. His photographs have been collected in four books, and his family was planning to open a museum, named after him.
His work shows remarkable intimacy with and access to top civil rights leaders. Friends used to say he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. But while he was growing close to top civil rights leaders, Mr. Withers was also meeting regularly with the F.B.I. agents, disclosing details about plans for marches and political beliefs of the leaders, even personal information like the leaders’ car tag numbers.
David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written biographies of Dr. King, said many civil rights workers gave confidential interviews to the F.B.I. and C.I.A., and were automatically classified as “informants.” The difference, Mr. Garrow said, is the evidence that Mr. Withers was being paid.
Although Mr. Withers’s motivation is not known, Mr. Garrow said informers were rarely motivated by the financial compensation, which “wasn’t enough money to live on.” But Marc Perrusquia, who wrote the article for The Commercial Appeal, noted that Mr. Withers had eight children and might have struggled to support them.
The children of Mr. Withers did not respond to requests for comment. But one daughter, Rosalind Withers, told local news organizations that she did not find the report conclusive.
“This is the first time I’ve heard of this in my life,” Ms. Withers told The Commercial Appeal. “My father’s not here to defend himself. That is a very, very strong, strong accusation.”
In 1992 Mr. Pruitt and a collaborator, Jack Early, put together a splashy, irreverent exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery exploring the marketing of African-American culture. A decade later it might have been the subject of battling reviews, but at the time the winds of political correctness quickly turned the show, by two Southern white men, into an incendiary event. They were called cynical, even racist, and were essentially drummed out of the art world for years; Mr. Pruitt ended up selling couture dresses for a while and coming up with craft ideas for Martha Stewart Living.
As a man who earnestly, and convincingly, describes the gallery world as his church, Mr. Pruitt was devastated by his expulsion from it. In a sense he has worked for almost 20 years to earn a place back among the faithful. And with his new show, “Pattern and Degradation” — whose pieces fill more than 13,000 square feet of space at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the West Village gallery that represents him, and at a nearby gallery, Maccarone — Mr. Pruitt is making his most ambitious bid yet. He seems to be trying to make a case for himself not just as a congregant but also as a deacon, a major artist.
The show, which runs through Oct. 23, was two years in the planning. In addition to a room filled with bright, eye-popping paintings inspired by Amish quilts, whose patterns he researched on numerous trips to Amish country and quilt museums in Pennsylvania, there are monumental self-portraits; a wall of photo-based paintings of Cinnabon cinnamon buns topped with fake icing; paintings of T-shirts; oil paintings made from Ikea wall-art pieces; a room of cast-off tire sculptures; and wallpaper made from pictures of all of Mr. Pruitt’s Facebook friends (more than 1,300 at the time the wallpaper was printed) and from viral shots on the Web of “kitlers” — kittens that resemble Hitler. With a sly grin Mr. Pruitt describes the show as an attempt to “stretch myself a little bit.”
Hustling around the gallery last week in seersucker shorts and a purple-and-orange-striped T-shirt, a cigarette drooping from his lips, Mr. Pruitt said the profusion of works grew out of a fascination with the idea of rumspringa as a period of culturally condoned individual abandon before the inevitable acknowledgment of responsibility, a particularly American kind of ritual.
“I’m very interested in the way American culture sort of celebrates and craves a certain period of bad behavior in people,” he said. “And then I started to think about how the life of the artist is a sort of permanent rumspringa, how artists are allowed by society to be the ones who get to act crazy and drunk for everyone else.”
Though Mr. Pruitt, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Rockville, Md., did not come from a particularly religious family, strains of the religious have long run through his work. He has made tricked-out tombstones and baptismal-like fountains from Evian boxes and Evian water.
When his father died two years ago, he created a sculptural sarcophagus for his ashes, topped with a model of a Corvette, a car his father loved. (The sculpture, with the ashes, has recently been sent to exhibitions in Italy and France. “I just think it’s exciting that he’s traveling the world now, because he never got to when he was alive,” Mr. Pruitt said.)
Even the cocaine piece, for all its brazenness, caused the people who were consuming it to look like supplicants, on their knees.
Throughout, Mr. Pruitt has been adept at maintaining a slippery position toward the cultural excess he traffics in. “On the one hand I want to celebrate it, because it’s who we are and on the other hand I want to condemn it,” he said. “I think it’s always like a Ping-Pong match for me.”
In the new exhibition, though, Mr. Pruitt might be starting to show his hand. The tire sculptures, prettified with white paint on their tread patterns, making them look like gorgeous folk-art totems, are piled with candy that visitors can grab in handfuls. “They can think about getting fat” as they munch from candy bowls made essentially of industrial waste, he said.
The Cinnabon portraits — whose icing patterns riff on the Conceptual patterns of Sol LeWitt — look as if they could increase the nation’s obesity epidemic all by themselves. Staring at them longingly are trash monsters made from bales of cardboard boxes, looking like something dreamed up by Sid and Marty Krofft’s evil twins.
“I think there’s a deep strain of humanism and humanity in Rob’s work, but it’s strangely directed,” said Mr. Brown, his dealer. Even in the art world, he added, about half the people he talks to about Mr. Pruitt’s work “just don’t get what he’s up to.” (The ones who do — or at least trust those who do — are increasingly influential; as the show was being installed, Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate developer and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, came in and bought a painting, clapping Mr. Pruitt on the shoulder as he left.)
As wildly multifarious as the show is, everything in it seems to pivot on the idea of pattern and design as a valiant but usually doomed attempt to impose some order and beauty on a random, chaotic world, as the Amish do in their meticulous quilt work.
Mr. Pruitt allowed that in using the Amish as a backdrop, he did worry a little about being accused of insulting yet another minority group, this time a religious one.
“I hope not,” he said, explaining that he had developed a respect for the Amish in the course of his quilt research. “I really did it out of love. But I guess I’m a little like a reckless puppy plodding around trying to eat something that’s not even food, and chewing your shoes and licking people who don’t want to be licked.”
Then again, he mused, getting in trouble all those years ago, as painful as it was, was probably the best thing that ever happened to him.
“It mythologized me,” he said, smiling broadly, as if the idea just occurred to him. “And you really can’t buy that.”
Bed Bugs: The Beauty Shots
The bug's compound eyes sit on the side of its head.
The remarkable anatomy of the bug seems custom made for blood sucking. It can drink three times its weight in a single feeding.
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