Mudge Fellow Transforms Beauty and Pain into Art

Some artists work with brush and canvas, or chisel and stone. For Boston-based visual and street artist Cedric Douglas, this year’s Mudge Fellow, his medium is whatever tells his message best, whether that’s a roll of police tape, a battered tambourine, or a rose. 

Groton’s Mudge Fellowship was established by the Mudge Foundation in 1992 to enhance students’ exposure to the arts. To that end, Mr. Douglas was on campus all week, working with Third Formers in their art classes and meeting with other students and faculty more informally. He walked community members through the background and inspiration for each piece in his de Menil Gallery exhibition during a reception on Tuesday, and gave a brief talk in the Schoolhouse’s Sackett Forum on Thursday. 

“When I look at the world, there’s not just beauty, there’s also pain,” Mr. Douglas explained at the reception. “A lot of this work came out of looking at my environment and talking about things that made me mad. When I get mad about something, I think of it as an opportunity to create art. Instead of talking about it or complaining on social media, art is an opportunity to get people to see the world differently.”

Tuesday afternoon, in Kristen Donovan’s Third Form art class, Mr. Douglas shared how, as an introspective kid growing up in Roxbury, Massachusetts, he longed to be like his artist uncle.

“I was a quiet kid. I didn’t really talk. I had all these ideas and thoughts but I didn’t know how to share them because I was afraid people would make fun of me,” he said. “My uncle was the opposite: He had this amazing personality. If you met him once you were his friend. I wanted to be like that.” 

His uncle taught him some graffiti skills and the young Mr. Douglas set off inscribing his artistic name, “Vise1”—it stands for Visually Intercepting Society’s Emotions—on neglected surfaces throughout the city. After tagging a rundown basketball court got him arrested, he decided to find ways to better harness his creativity.

Mr. Douglas eventually enrolled in the graphic design program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston and began to see his craft as creating truth as much as beauty. 

“Design can be a tool to change the world,” he explained. “A lot of my work is more about the idea and the message and less about the aesthetics and how it looks.”

Mrs. Donovan met Mr. Douglas in 2015 when he visited her art studio to talk to her students about his work.

“As I teach my students, as artists our job can seem solitary, however, our job is to start conversations by reflecting the world back to itself,” she said. “We either teach people something or they connect with our art through shared experiences, making the viewer feel seen and validated. Because Cedric’s work is a public art, it reaches so many more people. It teaches us, it makes us uncomfortable, and it honors the victims of police brutality.” 

She has dual hopes for Mr. Douglas’ time on campus, and the exhibit that will remain at Groton until early March. 

 

“As a mother who has lost a child, I personally connect on a different emotional level to the pain and suffering of the ‘memorial builders.’ I understand the rippling effect those losses have on families and communities when a life has been cut short. I have two hopes for Cedric’s show: that it will start a conversation on campus, teach us, and connect with us as a community. My second hope is that someday Cedric’s ‘memorial street project’ will be a historical piece. That there are no more victims to add to his list of names and roses and no more memorials to build in our streets.”

Much of Mr. Douglas’ work involves memorializing victims of violence whose names have been forgotten. He hung public art designed to look like street signs at the locations where young Black men and women were murdered. He customized rolls of yellow police tape with the last words of murder victims—“Don’t shoot” or “I can’t breathe”—to be handed out at protests. He transferred the faces of the nine people shot dead during Bible study at a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015 onto tambourines (an instrument often played at Southern religious services). And he passed out 400 roses in Boston Common, each tagged with the photograph and biography of a Black man killed by police. 

So, when it came time to work with Groton students, Mr. Douglas asked them to think of who they would memorialize in art, and urged them to remember everything they could about them. 

“The closer you can get to the real thing,” he said, “the better it is.” 

To the untrained eye, Mr. Douglas’ creative process can resemble the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist. (“It’s abstract, weird, and crazy, and I’m very comfortable with that.”) He starts with a core idea and puts an image—be it a photograph, sketch, whatever—on a bulletin board. Then he riffs, adding things that are related to the core (or not) around it, making connections with red string. Translating everything into something visual is key, he says: “By putting everything on a wall, all your thoughts, you can see connections to things.”

Armed with a new way of thinking, students broke off from the group to work on their own mini “mind maps,” drawing on pieces of paper. Music played, Mr. Douglas walked from table to table, nurturing more than supervising.  

“This process is fun,” he said. “Talk to each other. When you’re creating and having fun, when you’re not thinking so structured, that’s when the good ideas come.”

This idea of collaboration is central to Mr. Douglas’ work. He’s not an artist you’ll often find huddled alone in his studio.

“I like to ask people what they think,” he said. “Creating visual art to just look at and walk away, to me, is very passive. I want people to connect with my art. I want them to feel it.”