Black Lives (Still) Matter: Mary Tapogna at Studio Place Arts
The Lyndonville artist presents 10 memorial mosaics honoring Black people killed by police in "Black Lives Matter — A Portrait Series."
Soon after he took office again last month, President Donald Trump pardoned two former Washington, D.C., police officers convicted in the 2020 murder of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, a Black man. His killing, like those of so many others, had led to mass protests and demonstrations that year, exhorting the world to remember that “Black Lives Matter.”
In the nearly half-decade since, many people seem to have forgotten the urgency of the issue. Lyndonville artist Mary Tapogna has spent her time remembering. In “Black Lives Matter — A Portrait Series,” on the third floor of Studio Place Arts in Barre through March 1, she presents 10 mosaic memorials to victims of the police or of racially motivated vigilantes: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain, Kendra James, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner.
Each of Tapogna’s mosaics is in a similar format: about 20 by 20 inches, featuring a portrait with text on a mostly white background. The mosaic tiles are irregular, some made from broken plates, stained glass, marbles and shells, which allows Tapogna to create dimension and depth, raising areas up or adding reflective highlights. She has used bits of mirror on the edges of each piece, so they’re surrounded by haloes of light.
Tapogna treats each portrait with great reverence and attention, incorporating trinkets or particular bits of pottery that represent details from her subjects’ lives. Because Elijah McClain loved cats, Tapogna worked photos of her own felines into glass tiles. George Floyd’s portrait includes a plastic butterfly barrette — which Tapogna said in an email represented his young daughter — and a Madonna and Child charm to symbolize his relationship with his mother. Each portrait also contains a blank wooden butterfly, which to Tapogna represents uncertainty or unrealized potential.
Each mosaic features the subject’s name. Additional text can be subtle, such the delicately placed, written-in-cursive phrase “fuck the police” encircling McClain. Most of the portraits include an interpretation of the circumstances that led to each death — facts that should be inconsequential, such as “wore a hoodie” or “didn’t use her turn signal.”
The wall text next to each piece doesn’t discuss the individual’s death. Instead, Tapogna uses it to offer humanizing details that fill out each portrait: Sarah Bland earned a marching band scholarship; Eric Garner was a horticulturalist; at 9, Trayvon Martin rescued his father from a fire.
The portraits are impactful: Their physical weight and presence is an important aspect of the work that only comes through in-person viewing. Tapogna worked from photos that were fleetingly ubiquitous online and at protests. While viewers may have once doomscrolled past these same images, they have solidity and gravitas when committed to such a permanent medium.
Seeing the works from different distances is also crucial. From the wrong angle, they can be hard to parse; up close, they’re shards of something beautiful, incomprehensibly broken. The farther away you stand, the more they resolve into likenesses of ordinary people whose lives and legacies still matter.
by Alice Dodge February 5, 2025