We are living in a historic era for public art, when the images that form our unconscious notions of who we are as a nation are beginning to topple. Around the country, statues whose implicit purpose was to promote racial superiority are being removed and recontextualized. Here in Washington state, the Legislature recently voted to remove its 1950s-era statue of Marcus Whitman from Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. The imaginary depiction (no portraits of Whitman exist) helped promote a heroic legacy for a missionary whose story was warped and embellished to suit the prejudices of the times. The Washington legislators hope to replace it with a statue of the Nisqually tribal leader Billy Frank Jr. His fight for treaty rights and efforts to protect the environment are well documented.
As we correct the misinformation and omissions of history and seek true and fair images to replace old stereotypes, the Washington state Supreme Court has taken on the issue in its own Temple of Justice. During the past decade, the court has commissioned prominent Mexican American artist Alfredo Arreguin, ’67, ’69, to paint portraits of justices of color, beginning with the late Charles Z. Smith, ’55, the first African American to serve on the court. More recently, Arreguin completed portraits of the distinguished Justice Mary Yu—the first Latina, first Chinese American and first openly gay justice—as well as groundbreaking Chief Justice Steven González, the first person of color to serve in that position. Arreguin’s intricate, brightly colored paintings help balance the previous lineup of dark-suited white males. But it turns out those early portraits still have some diversity secrets of their own to reveal.