'No Kings But Us' explores music, history and civil rights from DJ Screw to John Lewis

A cluster of figures — yellow line drawings etched on a black background — animate the massive canvas that hangs near the high ceiling of Big Medium gallery in South Austin.

Some smile, while others gaze forward with steely resolve. A pair of mirrored Freedom Rider school buses are superimposed over the crowd, along with the words “idea + action” and “reaction.”

American civil rights icon John Lewis looks on from the right, while the late hip-hop community organizer Nipsey Hussle stands sentry at the left.

Claudette Colvin, who was a 15-year-old child when she was arrested for sitting in the wrong seat on the bus in 1955, gazes from the back of the painting. A row of disapproving, rosy-cheeked white folk line the bottom.

The words “time is time was time is time was NOW!” are scrawled in cursive under the painting. It feels like a mission statement for “No Kings But Us,” the new exhibit from HodgeKerr, Houston artist Robert Hodge and Austin art and music scene lifer Tim Kerr.

The two men collaborated to create a colorful collection of works that explores the intersections of American history, music, pop culture and our country’s ongoing struggle to achieve justice for all.

Meditations on history that unlock our common humanity

The line drawings in the background of “Time Was Now” represent actual Freedom Riders who participated in the Bloody Sunday protest on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in March of 1965.

Kerr is good friends with Tracy Martin, a Birmingham-based artist and daughter of the late photographer James “Spider” Martin, whose images of brutal police actions in Selma humanized the civil rights movement for white Americans around the country. (The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas houses an archive of Martin's photos.)

Each year, Tracey Martin — who helped launch Birmingham’s annual Día de los Muertos event — builds an elaborate altar for her father. One year, she tapped Kerr to paint protestors who had passed away.

Kerr, who is white, recreated the images as “ghost paintings,” the kind of faded line images you might see on the side of an old building. Then he passed the canvas to Hodge, who is Black, and collaboratively the two men created the freedom meditation.

“No Kings But Us” is the brainchild of Russel “The ARE” Gonzalez, a Houston-based music producer and art curator who kept works by both Kerr and Hodge in his H-Town space. When Hodge expressed his admiration for Kerr, Gonzalez had the idea to bring the two men together for a joint exhibit, “producing it like I would a singer-songwriter situation in the studio,” he said.

For over a year, he shuttled paintings back and forth between Houston and Austin. The two artists collaged images together. They painted over each other’s work.

“We started to learn each other,” Hodge said. “It was a good flow he would set something down. I would add things, he would subtract things, I would subtract things.”

“Neither of us were being precious about stuff,” Kerr said.

'We always have been doing civil rights and music'

Thematically, their work meshed beautifully. “We both are coming from the same place. So we always have been doing civil rights and music and all that stuff,” Kerr said.

The vibrant canvases feature pop culture icons like Mr. T, civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and fictional characters like Batman’s nemesis, the Joker. A trio of painted skate decks pay tribute to pioneering guitarist and singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, saxophonists Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler and Houston legend DJ Screw. One painting tells the story of Mississippi artist Otha Turner, leader of the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band, who helped keep the Civil War era tradition of fife and drum blues alive until his death in 2003.

Most of the time the works grew organically, but there were a few U turns along the way. Kerr began one painting as a green chalkboard with images of “a bunch of people that had stuff to say,” he said. Hodge, who is significantly younger than Kerr, read the green grid as a football field.

“I was thinking about the trappings of being an athlete and how you navigate them from even like Muhammad Ali's or Jim Brown’s (perspective),” Hodge said. “I was just talking about athletes and (how) they try to be political, but sometimes they get beat back down because if you’re gonna be political, you'll lose your career.”

An image of Colin Kapernick on the field drew both themes together.

'No Kings But Us' runs through Feb. 24 at Big Medium

After a small showing in Marfa, the exhibit opened to record crowds at the Blaffer Art Museum on the University of Houston campus last August. The Austin exhibit opens at Big Medium on Friday with a free reception from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. The exhibit will be on display through Feb. 24.

And, no, the title of the exhibit is in no way connected to the opening on Martin Luther King Day weekend.

“For me, it's about looking inward. It's about self esteem, like the way you look at yourself,” Hodge said. “So it's not the people you might think of as celebrities. ‘No Kings But Us’ means the common man, the person is actually doing the real work on the ground level.”

It’s a phrase that Hodge uses “to empower myself, to keep going,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin art exhibit 'No Kings But Us' explores music, civil rights