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Is Saginaw Safe?

Posted in: Art

The July 1, 2012 shooting of Milton Hall by Saginaw police got the City of Saginaw in news broadcasts and media around the world. Five years later, SVSU artist Mike Mosher reflects on the shooting through artworks informed by art history but inflamed by the issues that Black Lives Matter patriots have addressed. Can this city of black, white and everybody reform, revive, trust and prosper? Says Mosher: "I believe Hall approached me panhandling eight or nine years ago in downtown Saginaw, a troubled street person who deserved care and social services rather than forty bullets. The Black Lives Matter patriots, including at SVSU, have brought his kind of killing (now documented on cell phone cameras) to public consciousness. As a university-based artist, living in Bay City, I can't deny a degree of distance (adapting art historical models) and even irony in some of my approaches to the topic, based on a camera-mediated event which I did not personally witness. I hope Saginaw artists closer to the man and his community are dutifully at work on this subject as well. The small, appropriation-and-Photoshop-manipulation inkjet print is Eduard Manet's Execution of Milton Hall. This appropriates the French painter’s Execution of Emperor Maximillian, leaving only its central dark-skinned firing squad victim. The large painting, acrylics and bronze leaf on vinyl fabric, is July 1, 2012: The Killing of Milton Hall. As significant historic events of our time, I believe any incident where the state takes the life of a citizen is worthy of artwork. Perhaps every police force should have an artist on its payroll, to commemorate any police killing with a painting, then permanently exhibited in public. Showing will be at Counter Culture, 620 Gratiot, Saginaw. 6 pm reception. and 7 pm Panel/Community Discussion. These works will be on display through August, 2017.