Alice C. Pennisi

Nine American Boys Series

Alice C. Pennisi

Who are these people? Why were their portraits painted?

 During Fall 2015 I began an arts-based research project on the treatment and mass incarceration of African American young males in American history and the use of extreme sentences, particularly the death penalty, as punishment. The project focuses on the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American youths aged 12-19, who were falsely accused in 1931 of raping a White woman and a White girl in Alabama. The boys were arrested, tried, convicted, and given death sentences (the youngest was given life), all within 15 days. After huge international protests and many court cases, the last one left prison in 1950. I painted each of the nine boys based on photos taken at their arrest or imprisonment, and depicted them instead as school graduation portraits.

Nine American Boys is the third group in the larger Memorial Portrait Series that I have been making over the years. The Soviet Series is of individuals “disappeared” during Stalin’s reign, while the Cambodian Series is of People who were prisoners at Tuol Sleng Prison during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Each series utilizes photographs that were used as evidence by their own governments. The photographs were not portraits. They were made at a time of great terror, humiliation, and coercion. Being photographed was part of the weaponry of the captors. This work is my way of transforming and recontextualizing those images.

These nine portraits are about a time in American history when African Americans had few rights. However, they also are about all of American history, including the present. Each youth was a person with potential if given opportunities so many others have been given. It was difficult for these boys after they were freed. Just like exonerated prisoners today, there was very little to help them adjust to life after prison; only one is known to have lived to old age. I do not know all of their individual stories. I do know that I want to honor these nine as individual human beings. It is a way of acknowledging them—and reminding us.

                                                    “Truth needs witnesses.” —Albert Camus