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Image of In Custody (Project for a Southern Armory)

Crawford Gillis
American, 1914–2000

In Custody (Project for a Southern Armory)

1936

Object Type: Painting
Creation Place: North America, American, Alabama
Dimensions:
18 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. (47.63 x 59.69 cm)
Medium and Support: Watercolor on paper
Accession Number: 2013.0013

Credit Line: Gift of George W. and Sue Royer, Jr.


"In Custody" (Project for a Southern Armory) was exhibited in New York at the Delphic Studios in January, 1938. In a review of that exibition, the writer asked Gillis where he had seen the subject. "I didn't see it," he explained. "They announced they would build a new armory in my town (Selma, Alabama), and this is how I felt it would work out."

Gillis' painting portrays a frightened black man in the custody of National Guardsmen. The look of terror on the figure's face conveys his reaction to an environment that was overtly hostile to African-Americans in the time of Jim Crow laws, combined with other abusive practices that operated outside of the legitimate justice system. Within the small-town cultures of the South at that time, poor people, white and black, had little recourse when they became ensnared within webs of hatred and greed.

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