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When things go wrong here, we cause harm
Letter from the Editor Every so often, we get a stark reminder in our newsroom of the power of our platforms and the harm we can do with them inadvertently, a reminder that we have to be ever vigilant and that we live in a glass house where everything we do is on constant display.
We had such a reminder this week – one of those happenings that are almost too bizarre to believe. And it caused some harm.
Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national holiday, and to honor it, our esteemed arts writer Steve Litt told the story of Cleveland artist Wadsworth Jarrell. Steve described him as one of America’s most revered Black artists, someone who has spent his career “creating images of Black beauty and power to promote self-reliance and a spirit of overcoming.”
Steve explained that Jarrell has a new book about an artist collective he helped launched in the 1960s to promote positive images of Black life. The collective is called AfriCOBRA.
Jarrell explained to Steve that he did not favor images in art of Black people in slavery or other negative images. He specifically told Steve he deplored “Open Casket,” a controversial painting of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was killed and mutilated by white men in 1955. Artist Dana Schutz painted the image.
So where did we go wrong? The lead image for Steve’s story, on the cover of our Sunday arts section, was a painting attributed to Jarrell that he did not paint. To make matters worse, Dana Schutz painted it. Yes, the artist behind an image that Jarrell specifically criticized.
And it ran huge on the page, taking up the top half of it.
So here we were, trying to celebrate the life of a legendary Black artist who lives in Cleveland, and we did him the disservice of illustrating the story with a painting he did not paint by an artist who also painted an image he abhors. Steve was mortified. We all were.
How it happened is hard to fathom. We have long archived our photos in an online service called Merlin. In 2017, it appears, a picture of a Schutz painting called “Assembling an Octopus” was uploaded into Merlin, but it was labeled as a painting called “Heritage” by Jarrell. A bunch of photos of Jarrell and his wife and their art were uploaded into Merlin at the time, to go with a package Steve did on an exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art celebrating the Jarrells’ work.
Steve published a lot of photos in with his story in 2017, but the incorrectly labeled photo was not among them. It simply went into the archive like a time bomb, waiting for a day when someone searched for Jarrell’s art to illustrate a story. Nothing in the archive identifies who uploaded the incorrectly labeled picture.
And when page designers were putting together the arts section package with Steve’s story for last weekend, they did go into the Merlin archive to search for Jarrell’s work. And they found the incorrectly labeled photo of Schutz’s painting.
What are the odds that a painting incorrectly attributed to Jarrell in our archive would be by an artist behind a controversial piece of art that Jarrell abhors? They seem pretty slim. But it happened.
We ran a correction, of course. And we featured Steve’s story on Jarrell big on our website for most of Sunday, with images of Jarrell’s art. If you missed it, check it out here. In the future, we’ll have more eyes on covers of our various sections. I’m sure that if Steve had seen the page before publication, he would have recognized the error and stopped it.
And we are all reminding ourselves to double-check everything whenever possible. Few would suspect that information in Merlin could be so wrong, but wrong it was.
Thanks,
Chris Quinn Editor and Vice President of Content
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