“Whispers From The Walls,” American Legacy
When fist viewing a portrait by Whitfield Lovell, you feel you are looking at someone familiar. His men, women, and children, all of them ordinary black people from the period after Reconstruction and before the civil right era, haunt you with their calm self-possession. Some appear well-to-do; others look poor, tired, sad. But there is always an intelligence in their eyes that says they control their own destinies, even if only for this moment.