Thom Shaw
The Anger and the Art
by Ruth K. Meyer, Artwhirled

When we met for an interview we reminisced about the many years we have known each other coming and going in the art world of Cincinnati. I didn't know about his heart attack. I was abroad at the time. Seeing the new self-portrait work in the Chidlaw Gallery at the Art Academy of Cincinnati was a shock and a revelation. Thom Shaw had put his anger on display before - most recently in shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum (1996), Northern Kentucky University, (1998) and the Weston Gallery (2001). But the prints and drawings in his Academy show revealed new and more personal dimensions of pain and mortality.

Shaw has been a commercial artist and professional painter who always kept a studio going while working for Cincinnati Bell. Now retired from the job he held for twenty-seven years he finds time to teach while making art and pursuing national exhibition opportunities. Currently his work is on view in a solo show at the Huntington Museum of Art, WV, and a group show at the Akron Art Museum.

Here is what he has to say about the work in his own words.

I was doing a lot of black and white work about thirty years ago but the works were so personal I wouldn't even show them. I was going through a transition or odyssey trying to find Thom Shaw and a lot of different things were going on and at the time none of the things I did really quenched my soul but I was doing them as a way of making money, getting shows and galleries to be interested in me. None of the things I was doing in the '70s and 80s really did much for me but I hadn't come to any realization of who I was as an artist. Also, I was doing a lot of print making sort of going through the motions because I was doing an eight to five job. Two careers were going on and art was sort of on the back burner, but I wanted to be competitive. So for a while in the mid-'70s I took a hiatus from print-making and those more personal things. I was painting and drawing and when I started printmaking again and had to relearn it in the mid-80s.

What brought me back to graphic art was that I was in Chicago showing my paintings to dealers there. Going back to my hotel I came upon a gang fight and it struck me funny that these guys had these huge X's on their clothing and this was the Malcolm X stuff they were wearing back in the day when Malcolm was a leader. Now at this moment I'm in transition and desperate for ideas and I think "isn't that interesting?" So back at the hotel I began thinking and later started doing research using a camcorder going around interviewing gang members. It was dangerous but I was very excited. I was trying to make some sense of what it could become for me. I interviewed all kinds of gangs, black, white, Spanish, Rastofarians, Wanna-bes. I met former gang members who had become evangelists and others who'd been jailed and were trying to get back into the community.

With all this stuff I had accumulated I went back to drawing and printmaking. During my first 25 years I was interested in showing painting because my prints and drawings seemed uneven. But now here's the newfound concept I want to do something with and I decided it had to be woodcuts and I came up with a series as a way of disciplining myself and staying with the project. I would call it the "Malcolm X Paradox" because when I was interviewing I asked those gang members wearing big Xs if they really knew who Malcolm X was and they said sure, so then I asked them why they were beating the hell out of each other? In their minds they justified their behavior by saying they were getting along "by any means necessary." We've been dealt these cards here - poverty, discrimination, the inner city - and we'll use "any means necessary" to take over. But that's what Malcolm X referred to in the days when he was a gangster before he went with the Nation of Islam. When he came back from Mecca he was preaching global unity and reconciliation of the races.

I wanted the series to be much more than that. I wanted it to speak to the break down of the family. I wanted to speak to the sense of alienation. How does one person - and it doesn't have to be an African American male - how does one respond to alienation?

I started realizing that this iconography I'd been creating is so broad. I didn't want to say it was all males or concentrate on the self-annihilation of the African American male, but how to create an iconography of gang violence in our community and of social ills. Where does the responsibility fall. Having been in communication arts for more than thirty years I knew I had the skill to translate these ideas to communicate to special interest groups. In the early 90s Marta Hewitt showed the work in her picture window on Main Street and children walked in to see what it was all about. They were willing to walk in and they weren't intimidated by an art gallery environment. Then I thought well, maybe this work is TOO successful maybe it doesn't have the right edge. But it seemed to be very hip-hop to these kids. I started to make sense of my research on tapes and I had about 25-30 pieces but I still hadn't thought they were something I should be showing.

I think at some point I had become very angry and it was something I needed to articulate and this is how I could deal with it. When these kids began to be interested and were asking what the art was about then I started to think, WOW maybe this is something important to continue.

At the same time I began to do self-portraits. I began to look at myself both as an artist and as a man. My challenge was to look in the mirror and like or dislike what I see. If I don't like what I see then how do I articulate that in a visual way instead of doing something violent? So a year before the heart attack I had begun to do these self-portraits. When my heart attack happened the self-portrait series was well underway and then I began thinking more about my heart and that led to the pieces that show the open cavity. That's sort of a reminder to myself of what I'm doing. I wanted to do some deeper self examination and look at these inner monoliths, things I love, things I fear, identity, spirituality, belief systems I had encountered, how did they train me? The self-portrait series is broad and challenging. Don't know where it's headed, I know only it goes on. I think that Thom Shaw has a lot of issues. And I try to be honest. I try to deal with issues that others won't touch.

Shaw's prints and drawings in the Chidlaw Gallery show were of two themes; realities of the African-American community and his personal struggle to come to grips with heart disease. Shaw uses a style of social commentary that is recognizable from the German Expressionist movement of the early 20th century. He has successfully adapted their iconography of protest to his issues and concerns about his own people here in Cincinnati. Community of Zombies is a print that portrays the failure of parents and a public education system that has produced children that terrorize their neighborhoods. A comic book style formats their outcry which they scream from a text bubble with jagged edges This is an accusation of illiteracy and an attack on the limiting nature of popular media. Comic book learning is not enough to survive. Reversed letters and grotesque heads rendered in a black and white woodcut communicate to us the torment that they feel they must turn against us.

In another indictment of contemporary society, "The Malcolm X Paradox: Poverty's Paradise" Shaw portrays a mother trying to shoot up while holding her baby in her lap. It was the toughest image in the show, a woodcut of impressive dimensions and agonizing realism, in which the graphic style was supremely appropriate to the universal message. This mother is not to be recognized exclusively as African-American. She could as well be identified as Caucasian. Unfortunately, this is a universal paradox: women do bring children into the world and then they do not care for them.

Overcoming a heart attack is a challenge that many people have faced; so will others. Waking up from surgery to find oneself alive can only evoke an immensity of gratitude. Shaw makes these profound emotional feelings extremely evident in two works from his self-portrait series: "The Climb to Heaven Can Wait" and "The Beauty of Grace." He leans against a ladder and a crucifix dangles from his arm. It just wasn't his time. Not yet. A hand reached down and found the artist buried to the neck in wood chips. Mallets used to carve the blocks surround him. But his eyes are open. He faces the future of recovery. And then? These two works are not in fact woodcuts, they are ink on paper drawings made with a Rapidiograph pen, that demonic tool, to those who have tried as students to master it. Shaw did master it through his career as a commercial artist and now that he has time to be a full-time artist he displays how he can employ that pen with sensitivity and brutal clarity.

The show at Chidlaw Gallery was called "Homecoming," in resonant homage to Thom's status as an alumnus of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He speaks with affection and respect of the teachers he had, the training he gained there. We, too, should be grateful for his homecoming from the terror of by pass surgery. Cincinnati is fortunate to have this artist remain among us. We have more to learn from him.

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