Stateside Podcast: Detroit artist Rashaun Rucker's allegorical pigeons

By April Van Buren

Published September 27, 2021 at 4:50 PM EDT

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A white pigeon coop in the foreground with three drawings on the wall behind it from artist Rashaun Rucker. The pictures show Black men with pigeons flying from their heads.

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"Pigeons aren't native to America, which I thought because I've always seen them here like everybody else. And then you come to realize, like, wow, somebody brought pigeons here, like they brought us, and it was around the same time period. And pigeons were used for, you know, sport, you know, for target practice, for easy food supply. Basically the relationship was about what you could get out of the pigeon. And I found that similar relationship with Black people."

Courtesy of the U of M Institute for the Humanities / WO#123867

A photo of Rashaun Rucker's drawing titled "Left at First Light" that shows a pigeon emerging from the afro of a Black man.

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"Left at First Light" by Rashaun Rucker. "I'm using light as just a symbolism for knowledge, and just about how the more you learn about yourself and your history and who you are, and what you want to become, it creates a certain freedom," Rucker explained.

Courtesy of the U of M Institute for the Humanities / WO#123867

A photo from Rashaun Rucker's Never Free to Rest exhibit at the Institute for the Humanities. It shows three orange clay pigeons with the images of a black man's face on them on the wall and a pile of broken clay pigeons on the floor below. On the far wall is a drawing of a pair of binoculars with Black men reflected back in the lenses.

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Rucker had a collection of bright orange pigeons fabricated with an image created by collaging a variety of mug shots. He said he drew inspiration for this piece when he noticed that clay pigeons are usually bright orange and black. Those colors reminded him of bright orange prison jumpsuits—and the toll of mass incarceration on Black men, in particular. The artist said the process of breaking them for the exhibit took an emotional toll on him. "It just made me think about people I know who are broken in that way, who never were able to recoup their lives after being incarcerated."

Daryl Marshke/Michigan Photography/UM Photography,D.Marshke / WO#123867

“In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest — and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.”

Those are the words of Black writer, thinker, and civil rights advocate James Baldwin. And for many Black Americans, those words ring as true today as when they were written by Baldwin nearly 50 years ago.

That includes interdisciplinary artist Rashaun Rucker, whose latest exhibit—Never Free to Rest—draws its name from the quote.

“To me, it just kind of hit a chord with me always whenever I saw that quote by him, and it just spoke to me about some of the burdens that we carry as Black people and especially as a Black man.”

Rucker had been wanting to explore ideas around "conditioning and Black men in America" in his work when he got some advice from fellow Detroit artist Tiff Massey: make it unconventional.

Enter: the pigeon.

On the way to his job as a photographer with the Detroit Free Press, he ran across a flock of pigeons pecking at some spilled popcorn on the side walk. Rucker tried to scare them away, but they wouldn't budge.

"I said to myself, like god, I really hate pigeons. And it was like ding ding ding! It's like, oh my god, people probably think that way about us. We're in the way, we're taking up space, we're supposedly living off scraps in the system."

Click through the photos above to read more about how Rucker used images of pigeons to explore and critique the way that Black men are treated in America.

Never Free to Rest is on view to the public at the U of M Institute for the Humanities in Ann Arbor. The show runs through October 15, 2021. Rucker will be giving a virtual talk about his work this Thursday evening, September 30 as part of the Penny Stamps Speaker Series.