The Southern Poverty Law Center manages an online map of hate groups in the United States. Last week, that map identified 892 of them, including one in Springfield that opposes rights for the LGBTQ community, one in southern New Hampshire that advocates “radical traditional Catholicism” and a statewide presence in Connecticut of the Militant Knights Ku Klux Klan.
The center considers the operations of even obscure and marginal groups a threat to the well-being of all Americans.
Artist Steve Cole does as well. Inspired by the center based in Montgomery, Alabama, he has fashioned a different sort of map that until Dec. 7 can be trod by visitors to the Hampden Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
It was three years ago that Cole, who teaches art at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, created an exhibit called “The Hate Project.” It uses ceramic figurines to dramatize the presence of hate groups around the U.S. That was years before the incendiary language of a presidential candidate electrified a growing number of white nationalist groups.
Since 2008, when the U.S. elected its first black president, the number of hate groups has risen sharply, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports.
In the course of his campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump tossed off rhetorical sparks that lit fires of hate around the country.
The center has reported on the consequences: increased instances of bigoted actions that target minorities, including in the days since the Nov. 8 presidential election.
Cole’s exhibit at UMass opened weeks before the vote, when many still hoped anti-immigrant and racist fevers would pass and that American voters would turn back the candidate who appeared to stoke them.
There’s something incongruous about what Cole presents on the floor and walls of the UMass gallery. The gallery’s floor space proved too small to accommodate a full U.S. map that Cole deployed in other exhibits.
Given the vile aims these groups pursue in real life — as neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, border vigilantes, white nationalists and neo-Confederates, among many others — visitors to the gallery might expect them to appear as little monsters. But Cole’s concept is to allow their malevolence to retreat into childlike figurines, their threat quieted except for the ugly slogans they hold on signs (one reads, “God Hates Fags”), the Nazi salutes they perform or the white hoods they wear.
It takes a close look to see this isn’t child’s play, it is the work of hate-filled people masquerading as innocents.
The exhibit isn’t only a map of monstrous little figures. Cole is showing photographs he took at a skinhead rally in California and wooden sculptures, including a hooded KKK figure. Visitors can also review examples of hate literature.
In a statement, Cole explains that he was inspired in part by a Buddhist saying which holds that peace and compassion can advance through small actions. “Well, hate and intolerance can grow too by the smallest of inaction,” Cole says. “This is a call for the rational and courageous to speak up when others can’t or won’t.”
Some may find it too difficult, within weeks of the election, to walk into the deceptively bright darkness of the world Cole depicts.
As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
In an email to the Gazette, Cole, who works just 190 miles southeast of Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, said he too feels the presence of groups that once stalked this region’s history.
“The Klan and other groups like them are not relics from the past,” he wrote. They’re “still a force that needs to be tamped down by people who are not complacent and will continue to fight for tolerance and the rights of others.”
Cole’s traveling exhibit may seem like a curiosity, but his aim is true. People who foster hatred despoil the American promise. This is not their time.
The gallery, in the university’s Southwest Residential Area, is open Mondays through Fridays from 1 to 6 p.m. and Sundays from 2 to 5 p.m.