ARTScope Magazine July/August 2020

INTERVISIBLE AT BROMFIELD

RUFO DECONSTRUCTS BOSTON’S REDLINING

Caroline Rufo’s installation Intervisible, a critique of historical redlining practices targeting African-American homeowners around Boston, opened in SOWA in early March.  Days later the pandemic shuttered the Bromfield Gallery.  Since its reopening in mid-June to an America convulsed by protests over George Floyd’s brutal murder, Rufo’s interrogation of white complacency and governmental complicity in systemic racism could not be more timely. 

Intervisible is a work of acknowledgment and atonement.  Visitors enter a fluttering, papery maze of lacy floor-to-ceiling curtains bounded by quilted, hand-dyed cotton batting stitched together and pinned to the walls. The flat shapes of blue, green, yellow, white and red correspond to a 1937 Residential Security map of Boston’s neighborhoods issued by the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a federal agency created during the New Deal.  The HOLC gathered personal and financial data about mortgage applicants, home values and neighborhood racial composition and produced racially color-coded maps for hundreds of cities, intended to identify and disqualify blacks from obtaining federally-subsidized home-owners’ insurance, required for a conventional mortgage. 

Redlining denied Blacks financing to purchase or maintain their homes, shunted them into hyper-segregated neighborhoods, depressed resale prices and motivated Whites to flee the cities.  Over decades these invidious policies barred Blacks from buying into the American dream of a home that would accumulate wealth for the next generation.  

The politically self-aware, room-sized interactive work may seem at odds with the lush paintings on the artist’s website, but it is deeply grounded in Rufo’s evolving artistic and personal commitments.  She left a graphic design career in New York City in the 1990’s to move back to Boston and pursue her MFA at Mass Art’s Studio for Interrelated Media, then raised a family in Needham with her architect husband.  Having grown up with a realtor mother, she’d known of tensions undergirding the suburban neighborhoods whose charm she loved to paint.  As Rufo shifted toward fine art and teaching, her discomfort with the disconnect between city and suburbs increased. 

Elizabeth Michelman: How did this start?

CR I was looking around my hometown in Needham and asking, “How did this place get so segregated? What are the barriers that white people like myself have to seeing the underlying structures that have divided races and financial situations for so long?”

I started to learn the history of redlining, real-estate covenants and predatory lending practices.  I saw how people like me are encouraged to focus on our kids and their advancement and think about just a small sphere around my life, and not question all the subtle promotions that have permitted me to get ahead, while less subtle discrimination has held others back. 

I think of this work as a deconstructed quilt.  It’s appropriate to this subject; quilts are shared.  Everything is cotton—thread, twine, paper, fabric.  The map is cotton batting, which is normally found inside a quilt.  These situations and built structures are “inside the quilt” of many American experiences.  The cut-outs include Harvard pennants, Battenberg lace and house shapes.

EM What’s the color-coding?

CR First grade is dark green, second is blue, yellow is third and red is fourth, in terms of availability of financial products like mortgages.  The data comes from worksheets people filled in.  The language used was racist and unembarrassed—identifying people as “unwanted” and “marginal.” And race is very much what they’re basing this on.  Catholic is definitely not so hot, and Jewish as well, but, in the social stratification, to be black would be the worst possible situation, to put it in blunt terms. 

It was amazing to see how where I live was broken down into areas.  A lot of people in the suburbs might, by no fault of their own, be completely unaware that the reason they live in a segregated area isn’t an accident.  It was … enforced, manufactured.  Many people were never taught this. It is not a Southern problem.  It was engineered, in the north, all over the country. The maps are a graphically convenient way to help people see how we got here and that it didn’t “just happen.” 

EM This project picks up your paintings’ themes of “New England” and “Neighborhood.”

CR There are also formal parallels.  Putting together the images in the “lace” panels is not so different from how I’m superimposing text on my abstract paintings.  You can read the map in the background as an abstract composition; and then you see the symbols in front of and on top of it. 

EM Your aesthetic supports the ethical dimensions. It’s visually and thematically rich yet done with fairly simple, understandable techniques. Viewers may not know everything you did to make the piece, but you offer a path that they can follow.

It’s about simplifying and clarifying what needs to be there and what doesn’t. ‘Cause there’s already enough; it’s loaded.  

EM I can’t help but think of “the lace curtain Irish” in Boston

CR In my Irish background that term denotes class and status. There are associations with lace curtains and covering over, choosing not to be seen or not to look out a window.  Battenberg lace, a nineteenth-century American-designed cotton “tape lace,” was named for Victorian royals.  It’s celebrity culture and aspirational following of the white elite.   The chain-link fence is more explicit.  On the one hand, there’s the soft barrier of the lace.   On the other there’s the physical metal barriers that we put up to divide geography.

In urban planning, “Intervisibility” is two points in the landscape that are mutually visible, like the Washington Monument and the Capitol, or two people that can see and be seen by each other.  It’s something that I would like us to reach.   Walking through, there are places where you can get very close to the map and others where you can’t.  Looking through many layers of curtain you lose that background of the redline maps.  

The process was drawing, first.  For the cotton bolls, I went to the nature lab down at RISD and hand-drew some of their samples. I drew from actual lace. I put it all together in Adobe Illustrator and sliced it into panels, then used my school’s laser cutter to cut out the panels as individual drawings.  My studio is not big, so I’d lay the pieces out in the classroom to see what was going on.  I play with scale; the lace and chain-link are blown up, but the houses are much smaller. 

I took the 1937 HOLC maps and gridded them up and copied them onto the batting.  Then I cut out pieces, dyed them, reassembled them with help from colleagues, and machine-stitched them together at home.  

EM Kara Walker is your hero, with her master-slave silhouettes. You say you couldn’t speak from Walker’s perspective, you had to speak authentically from your own, what you could or could not see.

CR What I can do has to do with my position within this cultural situation. Racism is mostly a White problem, in terms of who’s exercising it.  A lot of the work that has to be done is in the White community.  So I can talk about things that are leading me to be blind or have an ignorance that I have no right to have.  Maybe if I put that out in the world it helps other people dismantle these things in their own minds.  

Eliizabeth Michelman