 "Photo: Shawn Wright --The South End")
 "Photo: Shawn Wright -- The South End")
 "Photo: Shawn Wright -- The South End")
In his lifetime, DeVon Cunningham never thought he would see a black president.
But at the age of 73, the internationally acclaimed artist was among the millions of Americans who witnessed history on Nov. 4 after Barack Obama was elected as president of the United States.
But it was about six weeks before the election that Cunningham had the idea for his four symbolic paintings, melding various graffiti around Detroit’s dilapidated Cass Corridor with the wellspring of hope from Obama’s campaign.
“I was listening to Obama speak,” Cunningham said. “And he was speaking to the people, not the establishment. It’s like how graffiti is the voice from the streets.”
Cunningham, who earned his master’s degree in 1975 from Wayne State’s college of liberal arts, has used his brush to paint many portraits throughout the last 50 years: the Black Christ in the apse of St. Ceclia’s Church; President Ronald Reagan; former Mayor Coleman Young; Marvin Gaye; and Berry Gordy, Jr., just to name a few.
This time, though, a mere portrait wouldn’t suffice.
“A painting is worth a 1000 words,” Cunningham said. “[But] if you just go to the library, or the bookstore on campus, and browse through on graffiti you’ll find that there’s a groundswell in the art movement, the same way that this [election] was a groundswell from the people movement.
“They [Obama’s campaign] went outside the establishment, went right to the people and got donations.”
In fact, according to democracynow.org, Obama turned down $84 million in federal money, allowing him to raise and spend an unlimited amount during the election. He was the first major party candidate to reject the allotted taxpayer funds since 1976.
According to the New York Times, Obama raised more than $600 million during his two-year bid for the White House, with millions of small donors over the Internet responsible for a fair amount of it.
“This was the first example, maybe the Clinton or the Kennedy elections, of democracy,” Cunningham said. “The Bush thing was total aristocracy; it was total disregard for the people.”
Cunningham has seen his fair share of politics. He ran as a Republican for the Michigan state house of representatives in 1960, and again in 1962. Cunningham followed that by being vice chairman of the Young Republicans in 1964. And in 1980 he was elected as chairman of the 1st Congressional Republican District. But this is the first year that Cunningham has voted Democratic.
“After Bush, I became an independent and left the Republican Party,” he said.
‘Looking and watching’
Cunningham's paintings are immersed with symbolism, covering every inch of the canvas, and start as sketches of the environment that he wants to paint. In the lower left corner of one painting, a woman is seen peeking out behind a sign that reads, “Enough is Enough.”
“Down Third Avenue, they have the plaster coming off the brick. You can ride up and down the street and see it all throughout that area,” Cunningham said. “I went as far over as John R. You just get stuff off there like ‘Let Go My People’ that was written on the side of the wall.”
Cunningham first thought it read ‘Let My People Go,’ echoing the old Negro spiritual that is based upon the Old Testament account in which God told Moses to demand that the pharoah of Egypt set the Israelites free.
But a friend that he was with corrected him, “saying it doesn’t say that, it says let go my people.”
“I said, ‘I’ll be damned. That is true, let go my people,” Cunningham said. “In other words, relax. So, that’s why I put that in there.
“Everything else that is on there was graffiti off the streets, except for ‘I’m Watching You Looking At Me Watching You’ — that’s my own little thing that I use with my trademark.”
Cunningham’s custom phrase that is emblazoned on the paintings also came from what he saw in the Cass Corridor.
“It was so bad yesterday; there must have been 200 or 300 homeless people out there on the street, sleeping in the field,” said Cunningham about a drive he took on Nov. 13 down Third Avenue. “And if you drive slowly, and you look, you’ll see them watching. They look at you. They are looking at you, if you are watching them.”
But Cunningham distinguishes the difference between the two.
“Looking and watching are two different things,” Cunningham said. “Watching is more or less like looking for danger. Watching is not as subjective as looking — when you are on watch, you have other motives other than looking.
“But when you’re looking, it’s more objective than subjective. I’m looking at you watching me because you’re evaluating.”
Adding more credence to the symbolism in Cunningham’s work is something located in the lower left corner of the painting below the peeking woman.
“I put a flower in one of them, coming up through the cement, it’s the dandelion,” he said.
"With all the decay, and everything going on, even the dandelion, which is the most beautiful of all flowers to me, survives through everything.
“They are hearty plants, and they will survive.”
Right now, there are already buyers clamoring for some of the four paintings. And for someone like Cunningham, whose artwork has fetched more than $15-20,000, it is more important for these paintings to be hanging somewhere other than atop some private collector’s mantle.
“It’s better to be in a museum where people can see them, rather than go to some guy’s house,” he said. “And even if he gives you $5,000 for the picture, it’s just going to wind up on someone’s wall where the only ones to see it will be the people that go into their house.
“They are historical paintings, and we’re just trying to wait and get them in the right hands.”
