Travis Somerville at Catharine Clark - San Francisco

Travis Somerville's The Raft of the Grand Wizard (2003), from his recent exhibition "More Songs of the South," appropriates Theodore Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, the controversial painting shown at the 1819 Paris Salon. Gericault based his work on the story of the ill-fated frigate Meduse, which, in bad condition and severely overloaded, was wrecked off the west coast of Africa in 1816. The ship was officially transporting soldiers and settlers to Senegal, though it may have been involved in the slave trade as well. Just 15 men survived of the original 149 ordered by the captain onto a small raft. For his painting, Gericault arranged the desperate figures around a powerful African youth raising a piece of cloth in the hope of rescue.

Somerville substitutes eight men in Ku Klux Klan garments for the original dead and dying. He retains the pyramidal composition, but now the billowing sail is replaced by a burning cross, and the surmounting figure stands on a beer cask with "Dixie Brewing Company" painted on it. A large red dab suggesting blood occupies the center of the picture, and "Emancipation Day" is written across the composition in large ropelike letters. For the floorboards in Gericault's painting, Somerville has substituted railroad ties, perhaps referring to Chinese laborers who built the railroads in a condition of servitude; much of his work has several narratives working at once. The source of the painting is self-evident; the meaning is more ambiguous and foreboding.

The canvas is done in oil and oil stick over collage elements, layered, in turn, over a bottom stratum of architectural blueprints. Details of old newspapers remain visible along the margins, as do sheet music covers (e.g., a picture of Harry Belafonte with the title of the song 'Tm Just a Country Boy") and architectural drawings. On the right, above an image of the Capitol dome, is a clipping headed "Four Men of the Apocalypse."

People who look at Somerville's paintings assume that he is black, but The Raft of the Grand Wizard was created by a white artist who was born and raised in the South. Though Somerville moved to San Francisco in 1984, his pictures continue to probe the history of his native region, with its slavery and Jim Crow traditions. He has made use of the white-supremacist pathology of the Klan to redefine what it meant to be a white artist growing up in a culture so hostile to "the Other."

During the 1990s he began to paint individuals who have made an imprint on history, though he is not inclined to paint straight portraits. Aware of the contradictions and paradoxes of race, for example, Somerville has depicted the severed head of Malcolm X wearing Hollywood sunglasses and a white Klan hood. Thinking of the movie Boyz in the Hood (1991), he called his painting, done in the shape of an altarpiece, Boy in the Hood (2000). John F. Kennedy is represented in blackface over a tattered flag with the words "We the People" in 18th-century-style calligraphy below his head (America the Beautiful, 2002); Martin Luther King, Jr. appears in The Only Begotten Son (1997-98), along with a Nike logo and architectural drawings. It can be difficult to figure out a Somerville painting, but the artist encourages the viewer to become engaged in doing so. More direct in its meaning is Everybody Needs a Mammy (2001), a painting depicting an elderly wrinkled black servant in a white kerchief, with Walt Disney birds chirping and, below, the legend, "I'm Living on Fifth Avenue!"

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