Liberty and Justice

Known as an abstract landscape artist, John Moore executed this painting for The Alternative Museum’s 1986 exhibition Liberty and Justice. He wrote that he juxtaposed the images of the American flag and the Statue of Liberty, “along with the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with upraised fist from the 1968 Olympics … with the real-life lynching in 1930’s Marion Indiana” to create “an examination of Justice and Injustice on African Americans.” Moore wondered how witnessing the lynching affected the lives of the two smiling young girls, who are present in the crowd and reproduced again, alone, to the right of that image. The text, “Where are they now?,” refers to Smith and Carlos, and to America at the time of the painting’s creation. It could very well read “Where are we now?”