Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 25-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
In the lecture Mecca Normal presents, How Art & Music Can Change The World, I sometimes tell the story of how quilts, hung out to air, were used to assist escaping slaves. Various quilt patterns were code for which way to go, danger ahead and how to dress. Because there is very little written evidence about this practice, historians are reluctant to acknowledge the role codified quilt-making played in the enslavement of Africans in the United States. I am researching the possibility of a psychological pre-disposition in men who gravitate towards history. Do historians lie and obscure the truth more than non-historians? Lying is the intention of one party to disallow the other party from knowing reality. The liar has decided that his objectives are more important than the other party’s experience. Lying generates complex and chaotic results, including the unpredictable new reality the party being lied to participates in. If the truth comes out, the existing false alchemy requires a re-writing of history, but what remains to be documented when there were no authentic experiences? Along gender lines, there are more male historians than female historians, which is maybe why many women gravitate toward editing. Men, through history, have impeded women from telling their own histories—in recent times, by labeling art made by women as confessional or victim-oriented. I tell the story of the quilts because it inspires me. It may be folklore, fable or fiction—it is the story of how art was used to change the world.
