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Suspended: was taken only after many of his
activist colleagues had been arrested
The Art of Paul Stopforth and his close friend David Webster was
assassinated on a Saturday morning
Jonathan Shirland having gone to buy groceries at a local
supermarket. To be suspended is to
“ I have slowly suspended the narrative context of my search for meaning in favor of pictorial be in an unresolved, indeterminate
structures that emphasize the use of color...The importance of varied and complex figure/ state; to be exiled often results in
ground relationships suspended in fields of variegated color, constitute a search for beauty acutely experiencing a similar condi-
and mystery” (Paul Stopforth) tion for perpetuity.

uspended above the entrance to the Moakley However, if we return to the first
definition of being suspended - “hung
auditorium are two artworks by internationally above something” - the potential
Srenowned artist Paul Stopforth donated to benefits of the exilic condition (what
Bridgewater State University by Lawrence and Edward Said called its “pleasures” in his
essay, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates
Katherine Doherty in 2013. They are exemplary of and Marginals”) come into focus. In
Stopforth’s practice since he moved to the United this sense, being suspended offers the
States in 1988 in that they are technically daring pieces possibility of unique perspective, a
special vantage point above the conven-
that sparkle with luminosity. If you crane your neck tional, that connotes a kind of freedom

and look slowly, your eyes will become dazzled by from orthodox judgement and which
can foster “appreciative sympathy” to
the densely dotted surfaces, which allude to Xhosa, use Said’s evocative phrase. For me,
Zulu and Ndebele beadwork. These shimmering Stopforth’s practice is full of such senti-
patterns infuse and harmonize the “fields of variegated ments—his outlook has become pro-
foundly humane and optimistic despite
color” and the “complex figure/ground relationships” the deprivations of displacement. As he

that the artist identifies in the quotation at the start remarked in 2010, life in America has
made him more generous and open-
of this essay. But it is his repeated use of the term minded. It also allows him to explore
“suspended” in this section of his artist statement color and gestural mark-making for

that inspires ways into a fuller appreciation of these their own sake; under the constrictions
of apartheid, such enjoyment felt like a
paintings, and Stopforth’s practice more broadly. As betrayal of the struggle and its martyrs.
well as meaning to hang above or from something, Similarly, an interest in the traditional
the term also denotes an indeterminate but imposed arts of Southern Africa is something
Stopforth has only developed in exile,
cessation, or a painful enforced debarring. In this alongside his intense study of Buddhism

sense, “suspended’ is achingly appropriate for an artist and Hinduism, a critical armature of
his search for healing after moving to
who has endured thirty years of exile from his home Boston. His spiritual and intellectual
country. Stopforth left South Africa heartbreakingly explorations of a wide variety of world
cultures have encoded a truly global
close to the end of Apartheid, the terri- a mortuary tray after his death on 12 perspective into his work. Perhaps
ble racist regime his activist art repeat- September 1977 from brain damage exiles necessarily become adept at
edly condemned, most famously in his suffered during police detention) made cultivating a syncretic bricolage in
Death and Detention series. Works like Stopforth one of the most well-known the pursuit of a sustainable suspended
Elegy for Steve Biko from 1981 (which “Resistance Artists.” They also made identity. Regardless, his works can
depicts the charismatic leader of the him a target. The difficult decision guide Bridgewater’s mission to pursue
Black Consciousness Movement on to settle in Boston with his wife Carol a generous, enlightened policy of inter-
national engagement.

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