(New Orleans, Louisiana) Ferrara Showman Gallery is proud to present The Good Book, Emphasis on Good, the third gallery solo exhibition of Orlando-based painter, Michael Tole. Unveiling seventeen new paintings, the exhibition brings together two new, distinct series: revisionist biblical works and “artistic nudes”. The exhibition will be on view 28 October through 5 December with an opening reception on 7 November and a closing reception on 5 December, both from 5-8 PM, as part of the Arts District New Orleans’ First Saturday Gallery Openings.

Tole discusses the inspiration for his latest body of work . . .

The past few years have seen an exponential growth in government censorship and book banning in certain regions of the US.  The same states that are leading the nation in book banning are simultaneously adding the Christian Bible to the public-school curriculum.  Texas, for example, now leads the country in book bans, even as it has required the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and has added Bible passages to required reading lists in literature and history classes.  By illustrating the adult themes found throughout the Bible, the paintings in this exhibition expose the blatant hypocrisy of those who claim to be protecting children from adult themes in literature, while also mandating that they read from a book that contains fratricide, war, genocide, slavery, plural marriage, sex, sexual slavery and coercion, sex trafficking, prostitution, rape, gang rape (heterosexual and homosexual), the worship of pagan gods, corpse mutilations and dismemberment, infanticide, cannibalism of a child, human sacrifice, child sacrifice, and of course, torture and deicide. 

Beyond exposing hypocrisy, this exhibition poses the question: What constitutes a “good” book?  What constitutes “virtue” in literature and the arts, especially in light of the fact that the Bible (often called “The Good Book”) is filled with horrors and evil people?  What is the purpose of literature and art in culture?  Is virtue as simple as a lack of vice?  How do we decide what is and is not acceptable?  And what is lost when we are too squeamish to allow certain themes into our artistic discourse?

*read extended text below and further artist’s notes on each individual painting via the online exhibition alongside respective paintings

ARTISTIC NUDES

My first professional show was in the project room of Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas.  As I stood sheepishly by my paintings, a dignified Dallas dowager with a perfect silver chignon and wrapped in a fur (indubitably real) lazily commented, “Good looking and talented…you’ll go far,” as she brushed by me on her way out the door.  That was over twenty years ago, and times have changed.  A decade ago, my wife began forcing me to put my artwork on social media.  I am a luddite, and this did not appeal to me in the slightest, but I followed directions and did it.  Slowly, I amassed a bit of a following.  Next she demanded that I pose with my paintings.  “People want to know who you are.  Making it personal will increase your reach,” she said.  So I again followed directions.  Only this time, she was wrong.  At 40, every time my face appeared in a post, I lost followers.  I don’t mean I lost a couple of bots.  I mean I lost dozens of followers.  So much for that.  I was not to be an influencer!  Whatever advantage my youthful looks may once have imparted to me were no longer optimized for the algorithm.  This was not by my choice, but by the collective decision making of the social media universe.  But it confronted me with a reality that has only come into clearer focus with time.  Social media demands that the artist also be an artwork.

The paintings in the, Artistic Nudes, series reimagines modernist masters as social media influencer artists.  As social media has become an indispensable tool for artists to promote their work, it has also changed how the public sees and discovers artists.  Though the artist as solitary genius toiling in a lonely studio away from prying eyes was always a suspect notion, product of a cherry-picked group of early modernists like Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh who moved outside of the artistic mainstream of their day, today such self-isolation is simply not an option.  Social media demands that the artist create not just discrete artworks for appreciation, contemplation, and consumption, but also that they create a marketable artistic persona for appreciation, contemplation, and consumption.  Views are money, and money funds art.  Even if the artist is holed up in a dark damp Parisian garret, the intrusive eye of the cell phone camera and the voyeurism of the social media universe destroys the possibility of creative isolation even as it heightens artistic visibility.  Creativity is now a public performance for consumption by the masses.  The notion of performance is not new in the art world, of course.  Performance artists from Joseph Beuys to Janine Antoni, to Jackson Pollock have made the performative act central to their art practice.  But there has never been a period when technology placed such a spotlight on the physical person of the artist.  I now see many artists on social media platforms who are blurring the lines between artist, fashion, lifestyle, and model.  It is a reaction to a new way of being an artist in the world created and necessitated by what has become an indispensable piece of artistic infrastructure—social media.  The creative act itself is now a voyeuristic performance, and the artist often is the artwork as much as the painting they slowly spin around in their “big reveal.”  And for better or worse, artists must learn to maximize this tool to survive.  It is becoming ever more compulsory. 

The six paintings in this series reimagine Jackson Pollock and Joseph Beuys as social media influencer artists.  Performance, always integral to their work, now extends to their presentation to the world, and a new kind of voyeurism is injected into their imagined creative practices.  This work also intends to highlight the juxtaposition of the gender dynamics of Modernism and the world of social media, and the pressures of optimizing, or maxxing, ourselves as content for the social media algorithm.  It unavoidably calls up “the Gaze” and objectification with regards to people and artworks, and all the gender dynamics (regressive and progressive) that come along with it. To be clear, though there is an element of satire in this work, I am not being judgment of artists.  Art is a hard business, and we must avail ourselves of whatever advantages we may have.  I would do it too, if I could.  I tried it.  I no longer have this option.  We can critique the game and still love the player. 

Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Orlando, Florida with his wife and two daughters.  Born in 1979 in Dallas, Texas, he graduated from UT Austin with a BFA in painting in 2000.  A year later, he became the youngest artist ever represented by Dallas’ Conduit Gallery where he showed for 15 years.  For the first half of his career, he created photo-based paintings of retail interiors that explored issues of class and the relationship of painting and photography. 

After relocating to Tempe, AZ his work experienced a significant shift to fantastical figurative inventions based on pop culture imagery he has encountered via his two daughters’ taste in music videos, as well as his proximity to the twin capitals of America’s fantasy industrial complex: Hollywood and Las Vegas.  This work attempts to contextualize their brand of Disney-esque hedonism within a broader historical view of Western visual culture.

As fate would have it, he relocated in the summer of 2024 to Orlando, another node of America’s fantasy industrial complex.  Tole’s work has been exhibited nation-wide, in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and New Orleans.  Most recently his work was featured and awarded honors in the Wiregrass Museum Biennial in Dothan, AL and ArtFields in Lake City, SC. He has won several grants, including the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize, and the Kimbrough Grant.  His work has been reviewed in Art Forum International, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, and Hi-Fructose.com.  

For more information, press, or sales inquiries please contact Gallery Director Matthew Weldon Showman at 504.343.6827 or matthew@ferrarashowman.com. Please join the conversation with FSG on social media:  @FerraraShowmanGallery + @MToleArt + @ArtsDistrictNewOrleans.

Three years ago I was offered the job of my dreams.  It was a tempting offer, but it was in a state that led the country in book bans.  I was conflicted and concerned, but only mildly so, about relocating to a state that was actively curtailing free speech.  I have lived my entire life in conservative states with restrictive social mores.  Usually there is a big public theater of mass outrage about the topic du jour, but the quiet day to day doesn’t really change.  No one much cares about the private affairs of their neighbors, and no one really bothers to enforce the consequences of social or ideological transgression…as long as you’re polite to everyone and keep your yard mowed.  After all, I believe in free speech, but I am not a free speech absolutist.  I do not believe that, ph magazine, for instance, belongs in schools or public libraries.  As an outsider then, contemplating a move to my current state of residence, I figured the local book banning craze was probably much ado about nothing and would pass in time.  So first graders can’t read Game of Thrones…they wouldn’t understand it anyway.  We can read something else instead.  And besides, this state has good weather.  I accepted the tradeoff.

But this accommodating attitude has caused problems for me as an artist, parent, and general member of society since my relocation to the South.  This censorial local regime is not just engaging in ideological theater.  It is enforcing very real consequences.  In my state, a K-12 teacher faces termination, prison time, and a $10,000 fine simply for having a banned book in their classroom—not for teaching it—simply for possessing it in the school building.  And removal of the offending work is insufficient in the eyes of the law; the law states that the offending book must be handed over to an administrator and “destroyed,” even if it is the teacher’s personal property. This does many things beyond keeping certain works out of the hands of children (which could be accomplished simply by telling teachers to take their personal libraries home).  It creates a legally mandated ritual in which those that possess certain kinds of knowledge are compelled to reveal themselves to authorities, subjected to public shame, and then forced to participate in the physical destruction of their knowledge and personal property.  This may be political theater, but it is theater with real world consequences.  This gave me pause…

“But c’mon,” Michael, you may say.  “Why would anyone bring this filth into the classroom in the first place?  Such a lack of judgement, or worse, activism, should be punished under the law…these are our children, and they must be protected.”  Fair enough.  As I said, I am not a free speech absolutist.  I’ll indulge your appeal to moderation and take you through my experience trying to negotiate this region of the culture war as a reasonable person.

Though I am not a K-12 teacher, even my field of employment is increasingly being subjected to the oversight of governmental censorship.  In my current state, people in my field are losing their jobs for wrong thinking.  And it is at this point that the political has become intrusively personal for me.  My artwork is heavily influenced by literature, mythology, and historical texts, and if I choose the “wrong” text in these times, state censorship hangs like the sword of Damocles over my employment too.  But as I said, I don’t want to rock the boat, and I have too much to lose, so rather than fighting the good fight, selecting whatever text I want to make art about, and blithely accepting the consequences, I began the onerous task of self-censoring in a craven attempt to preserve my comfortable little life by staying on the good side of the powers that be.    

To set the stage for how I structured this process of defensive self-censorship, let me explain that I grew up in the conservative north Dallas suburb of Carrollton, TX.  I attended High School beginning in 1994, when the Christian Coalition was at the height of its power and controlled my local school board.  For those too young to remember, this was part of the wave of Christian Conservative political ascendancy that rose to local and national power in the 1990’s. Their power was real, and they used it, as the winners of elections are wont to do.  They were elected to governing bodies from school boards to congress.  According to my internal logic, if the book wasn’t a problem for the Christian Coalition in 1990’s in suburban Texas, it certainly can’t be a problem today, right?  So I began going through my K-12 reading list, assuming that anything on that list must be a safe bet.  But I was shocked by the number of books I read…in school… as assigned readings…in conservative Texas…with a Christian dominated school board…that are now banned in various states--including my current home state, and Texas.  Here’s a shortlist of books I was assigned to read in various grades that are now banned from many school libraries and curricula:

3rd Grade:

-The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas

6th Grade:

-The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

9th Grade:

-The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer

-The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck

10th Grade:

-Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck

11th Grade:

-Catch 22, Joseph Heller

There were even books that my own school aged children read in Arizona within the past five years that are now banned:

5th Grade

-Holes, Sachar Louis

9th Grade

-The Odyssey, Homer

Bed Time Reading

-Star Wars Rogue One: A Junior Novel, Matt Forbeck

-Camp Half-Blood Confidential, Rick Riordan

-The Blood of Olympus, Rick Riordan

Oh, and by the way, they banned the cowboy classic, Lonesome Dove…in Texas…the bastards!

To return to your imagined appeal to moderation, having read all of the books in the above list…none of them are filth.  There is no world in which prison time is a reasonable consequence for a High School English teacher having a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, or The Grapes of Wrath, on their shelf at school.  These aren’t the Marquis de Sade (which isn’t banned).

These book bans are often condemned or praised (depending on your political viewpoint) for targeting LGBTQIA or DEI themed titles…and having searched the entire naughty list, such titles are well represented.  But you may notice that the titles from my K-12 education listed above are NOT primarily about those issues.  The Odyssey and The Canterbury Tales are foundational works of Western literature.  The Fountainhead was authored by a scion of conservatism.  The Rick Riordan YA series is a ubiquitous resident of teen/tween bookshelves across the country and the sociopolitical spectrum.  These are just a few of the nearly 700 titles banned in my state, and it doesn’t even touch the now banned classics I read in college, such as Paradise Lost, Beloved, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, and Anna Karenina.  At least a third of the books I have read as part of my education, kindergarten through college (and all of my education was done in public Texas schools and universities), are now in the crosshairs of the culture war.  What was left?  How do I stay on the safe side of this panic?

I found an unexpected loophole in this ever tightening noose.  In many of the very states leading the book banning crusade, law makers are simultaneously requiring the Christian Bible be added to the public school curriculum.  Texas is now the leader in book bans, but Texas has mandated the posting of the Ten Commandments in K-12 public school classrooms, and added Bible passages to the required reading list in literature classes.  I hadn’t read the Bible start to finish since I was a child.  I had only the faintest memories of the material between the blockbuster stories of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Arc, and of course the New Testament, though in my sketchy memory, I recalled some pretty violent and incendiary tales.  But no matter, this book has been cleared by the Texas Board of Education as child safe material—suitable for all audiences--so I finally have a literary/historical text that is beyond reproach as a subject for my artmaking.  And if I use it as the inspiration for my next body of artwork, I would be in complete compliance with the powers that be and the social norms of my region.  Problem solved!  According to both its colloquial nickname, and the Texas Education Agency, the Bible really is, The Good Book.  I decided to find out why, and challenged myself to read the Bible beginning to end for the first time in my adult life too see if I could find any interesting subject matter for paintings.

What I found upon a careful continuous reading of the Bible shocked me.  For a fair and reasonable comparison, I presume Lonesome Dove was cancelled because it contains prostitution and a hanging.  The Grapes of Wrath must have been banned because the preacher talks candidly about his sexual misdeeds and crisis of faith, and a dying man is nursed by a young mother who recently delivered a stillborn baby.  Beloved, I must assume, was banned for sexual content, and infanticide.  In The Canterbury Tales, the Millier’s Tale is pretty “dirty.”  Admittedly, these are difficult themes.  But The Good Book contains fratricide, war, genocide, the slaughter of mothers and children, slavery, plural marriage, sex, sexual slavery, sex trafficking, prostitution, rape, gang rape (heterosexual and homosexual), the worship of pagan gods, corpse mutilation and dismemberment, infanticide, cannibalism of a child, human sacrifice, and child sacrifice (in full disclosure, I haven’t even finished the Old Testament yet…but I am working on it!).  None of the books on the banned list can compete with the sheer breadth of human depravity described in the Bible.  Anyone who claims to be protecting children from adult themes while promoting the Bible to children is an unambiguous hypocrite…or unambiguously ignorant of the Bible’s contents.  Job one for this exhibition is bringing that hypocrisy into sharp, unavoidable focus.

But as I got deeper into the Bible, and into illustrating the many difficult stories within it, I couldn’t help but move on to deeper questions about the value of art and story telling in our culture.  Why is the Bible, a literal litany of horrors, referred to as The Good Book?  What, in fact, constitutes a good book?  Is it simply that all its characters are virtuous people behaving virtuously?  If so, the Bible fails the test.  Is it a lack of violence or sexual content?  If so, the Bible fails the test.  Is it a lack of evil characters and deeds?  If so, the Bible fails the test.  And admittedly, the banned books on my shortlist also fail these tests.  Yet all of the above are labeled as “Great literature,” undisputed denizens of the canon of Western culture, and the Bible in particular is singled out as the word of God.  So what does constitute a good book?  Contemplation of those questions led me back to the following quote by the philosopher of Evolutionary Epistemology, Karl Popper:

“By Criticizing our Theories, we can let our theories die in our stead.” - Myth of the Framework, by Karl Popper

Popper was mostly talking about scientific theories, but I began reevaluating both the Bible stories I was reading and illustrating, and the banned books list in light of this quote.  These stories of horrific acts not just in the Bible, but in literature and art more broadly, exist, and have value, precisely because they have the courage to show the full range of human behavior, from the very worst to the very best—the most wicked to the most virtuous.  By presenting the fullest range of possible “theories” of thought, behavior, and consequences, art and literature allow the audience to let those “theories” play out in our imagination without suffering the real-world consequences.  Thus, as Popper says, the stories we tell in the arts allow “our theories to die in our stead.”  An evil character, or a naughty deed, do not doom an artwork to iniquity…they are the very fuel that drives the arts as an engine of moral, ethical, and social progress.  I can attest that the majority of the narrative sections of the Old Testament are comprised of people behaving badly, and suffering the inevitable consequences of their own actions.  Sometimes there are natural consequences.  Sometimes God helps drive the point home with some well-timed smiting.  Though I am not here to teach a course in hermeneutics, consider for a moment II Kings, Chapter 2, vs 23-25 where a passel of rowdy boys shout insults at Elisha (a prophet of God), and God punishes them by sending two she bears to rip 42 young boys limb from limb.  Lesson:  God doesn’t like bullies…and being a child doesn’t reduce your culpability or your sentence.  We learn about virtue from a story of vice, and we live to practice that lesson in the future…no she bears needed. In fact, I began to wonder if it is even possible to depict the Good without the Bad, Virtue without Vice, any more than I can paint light without contrasting it with darkness.  It’s not, of course, and so “The Good Book,” or just good books, must be judged not based on whether they include difficult or unpleasant subject matter, evil deeds or evil people, but for how thoroughly and accurately they paint the potential hypothesis and its possible outcomes.  When Cain kills Able, we are not supposed to emulate Cain, we are supposed to learn from his actions and their consequences.  In Beloved, we are not supposed to emulate the murder of Sethe’s Baby, we are supposed to learn from the sociopolitical circumstances that lead a mother to commit such an unspeakable act, and how it haunts her for the rest of her life.  The real danger in book bans and censorship of the arts is that it removes from consideration certain hypotheses, leaving us blind to the possible outcomes when we encounter similar situations ourselves.  The truth does not fear inquiry.  When we censor for the sake of “protecting our children,” what we are really doing is protecting ourselves from truths we are afraid to face, and unwilling to change in our own history, actions, beliefs, and character.  This is the value of the arts and humanities.  In a world that currently only considers the “how,” we need the arts to contemplate the why, the when, the should, and the potential consequences.  Without artistic freedom, we have instrumentality without purpose, restraint, or wisdom.  

Lastly, this show is not intended as a profession of faith.  Neither is it an indictment of and religion, the Bible, or the followers or any faith.  Nor is it an attempt to interpret biblical texts, as that is something I am unqualified to do.  This show is first and foremost about the value of the arts, literature, and story telling to humanity, even when the subject matter is difficult, horrific, or challenging.  Secondarily, this show is intended to show the mutually assured destruction that ensues when we begin the act of censorship.  The censor pointing the finger at others today can very easily find fingers pointing back at the works dear to their own heart tomorrow.  We don’t have to like everything.  We don’t have to endorse everything.  But works of art and literature put forth in good faith have value as explorations of human activity, morality, ethics, and self-improvement.