Daily Painting

Norman Rockwell
THE PROBLEM WE ALL LIVE WITH (1963)

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From The Kennedy Center website:

This is what actually happened to Ruby Bridges on her first day at William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960. Ruby was the first African American child to attend the school after a federal court ordered the New Orleans school system to integrate. The public outcry was so great that white parents withdrew their children from school so they would not have to sit with a Black girl. Ruby spent an entire year in a classroom by herself.

Artist and magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell is known for his idyllic images of American life in the twentieth century. But his work had a new sense of purpose in 1960s when he was hired by LOOK magazine. There, he produced his famous painting The Problem We All Live With, a visual commentary on segregation and the problem of racism in America. The painting depicts Ruby’s courageous walk to school on that November day. She dutifully follows faceless men—the yellow armbands reveal them to be federal marshals—past a wall smeared with racist graffiti and the juice of a thrown tomato. The canvas is arranged so that the viewer is at Ruby’s height, seeing the scene from her perspective.

Rockwell’s painting, created a few years after Ruby made her fateful entrance at school, was produced at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. It is now considered a symbol of that struggle. Bridges never met Rockwell, but as an adult, she came to admire his decision to tell her story: “Here was a man that had been doing lots of work, painting family images, and all of a sudden decided this is what I’m going to do…it’s wrong, and I’m going to say that it’s wrong…the mere fact that [Norman Rockwell] had enough courage to step up to the plate and say I’m going to make a statement, and he did it in a very powerful way…even though I had not had an opportunity to meet him, I commend him for that.”