TCNJ

39 WINTER 2021 Mural of the story Senior Megan Scarborough draws a new picture of an historic piece of campus art Megan Scarborough '21 has spent many nights peering through a window at Roscoe L. West Hall, which has been closed to students since 2005 when the library moved to a new building. "When the lights are on, you can see it," she says. That "it" is a mural painting on a wall that has drawn her attention and turned her into a kind of art detective. Scarborough, an art education major with a minor in social justice, first learned about the painting in professor Deborah Hutton's art history class. "We looked at decolonizing and diversifying museums," says Scarborough, "And that was when I was introduced to this idea of thinking about what representation means for communities of color in museums and art history." As part of that class, Margaret Pezalla-Granlund from the TCNJ art gallery talked about the mural. The painting, by Trenton-born artist Richard Blossom Farley, was a gift of the classes of 1909 and 1910 and depicts a treaty in New Jersey that shows a stereotypical white man standing over indigenous people. The scene appears harmonious but in fact documents the all-too-familiar taking of land from Native Americans, in this case the Lenape Indians. Scarborough has since produced a five-part podcast series that examines the controversial mural and raises compelling questions about how art history has been expropriated to tell only one side of a story. In tracing the history of the mural, Scarborough's podcasts explore the broader topic "of how whitewashed history is, especially art history," she says, not just at TCNJ but in campus museums all over the country. One thing Scarborough does not address is what the college should do about the mural. "That's not for me to decide," she says, hinting that she hopes members of the Lenape tribal nation will be given a say. For certain, she will teach her own students that representation matters. "This experience has been fundamental to who I am going to be as an educator." — Kara Pothier Scarborough's Not a Foot of Land podcast is available at tcnj.edu/mural is no genetic basis for race; it is a social construct." Later slides then expand on the point by showing how three different high-altitude populations — in Tibet, Bolivia, and Ethiopia — evolved dif- ferent ways of adapting to life in thin oxygen. "This shows you that there is tremendous diversity among individu- als that goes beyond the boxes of race," says Lovett, who taught Foundations in the fall semester. "What that did was very explicitly, but subtly, say that race is not a real thing and science is not going to be used to talk about one race over another." COVID-19 offered another vivid lesson. As the virus started spreading last spring, the death rate was espe- cially high among Blacks and Latinos. "There were actually people who were trying to find out what it was about minority groups that made them more susceptible, until some people took a step back and said, 'Wait, it has noth- ing to do with race,'" Lovett says. What made them more susceptible was economics — jobs that couldn't shift to home computers, cramped living spaces where the virus spread more easily. "What we're trying to do is help people identify systemic racism and implicit bias, even when scientists would insist that the research is unbi- ased," Lovett says. "Our goal is to help students identify that, but also affirm to our students of color that we're trying to reverse this, that we are not merely standing on the sidelines." ■ Kevin Coyne is a freelance writer who teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. PHOTO COURTESY OF MARGARET PEZALLA-GRANLUND

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