The Elgin mural is not the Elgin Marbles. Those Greek sculptures were infamously taken from the Parthenon to the British Museum 200 years ago, sparking a debate that still rages. But the story of this 21st-century Illinois painting, American Nocturne, with its disputed motives and retrospectively outraged public, is at least as complicated.
A decade ago, Beitler’s photograph also inspired Elgin artist David Powers, then working on the last in a series of murals the city had commissioned from the Outside Exhibition Group, a small arts organization that’s no longer active. Powers’s drawing for the Elgin mural, loosely based on the lower portion of Beitler’s photo, eliminated the victims in order to focus on the faces in the crowd—an intense and agitated group under a threatening sky. Art students from Elgin’s Judson University executed the painting in the summer of 2007 under Powers’s direction. The finished work covered eight four-foot-by-eight-foot panels, and was installed in a small park that’s also a walkway in the center of town.
Four days later, after a take-it-down-now message was found taped to the mural, Elgin’s city manager had the painting moved to the municipal cultural center, where it remained on display, but indoors. Public comment was taken at two subsequent meetings, and on June 13, the Elgin Cultural Arts Commission unanimously recommended that the city council remove American Nocturne from public display. On June 17 it was put in storage.
Exhibition group president Paul Pedersen says “the only ones who should be upset by American Nocturne should be the white population, dressing up to go to an affair like that—something we hope will never happen again. My wife is black, Mr. Evans is black. We never looked at this as a racial thing from the black side. More the other way around.”
