The answering of questions, showing of a Real ID, emptying of pockets, x-raying of possessions, stepping through a metal detector, all under the supervision of four armed guards was a bit much, but I get it – it is a federal building. My only business at the courthouse was wanting to see a particular painting again, so all the rigamarole was forgotten when the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor and I stepped out… and gasped.
Unlike many of the artists I’ve written about in this blog, Deborah Oropallo is not a household name, but this is my third post about her.1 Since the early 1990s, I have followed her where she has gone, even when that road has been a little uncomfortable for me. When, in the early 2000s, she began “painting” with a computer, and in 2008, when she started creating video installations, I was skeptical of the media. Although I had no doubt she would create something of worth, I could only hope it would be something to which I could artistically relate. I needn’t have worried, as she brought to these media the same strong painterly aesthetic that had imbued her previous work.
Back in 1997, when Oropallo was still producing paintings that were oil on canvas, she had a solo show titled Flat Pictures at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. The paintings were executed chiefly with silkscreens, which she had utilized before, but to my knowledge, never to such an extent. My favorite paintings in this particular show were of railroad tracks. There were several, some of which employ color; I prefer the black and white ones, which have a Franz Kline-esque quality to them. I seem to remember reading at the time the images were based on photos of pieces from her child’s toy train set, and that there were also actual tracks running past her studio in an industrial area of Berkeley, CA – Oropallo often makes reference to her personal environment in her work.
Although I didn’t, and still don’t know what the railroad track paintings are “about,” I do know Oropallo later used the motif in a very different manner, when she was commissioned by the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create a piece for the United States Courthouse, Sacramento, CA.2 She was among the fourteen artists asked to draw inspiration from the natural, cultural, and/or political history of the building’s site, located in what was, during the Gold Rush and for decades afterward, a thriving Chinatown, one of the first in California.
China Pattern pictures nineteen rows of vertical tracks running the height of the piece. To thirteen of the rows, Oropallo added Chinese writing to pay homage to the roughly 15,000 Chinese immigrant laborers who in large part built the western section of the Transcontinental Railroad – these tracks signify the thirteen mountain pass tunnels through the Sierra Nevada range the workers completed. With its high-contrast, minimal palette; all-over composition; and size – nine feet tall – the painting is immediate in its visual impact. Like the earlier rail paintings, China Pattern is heavily layered; there are seemingly endless tracks, representing the nearly eight hundred miles they laid, visible under washes of white.3 The effect is dizzying, hypnotic.
Although it does have color, China Pattern has more in common visually with the earlier black and white paintings than it does with the color ones. The only color in the piece comes in the form of the characters, which spell out “fire cart” – the translation of “train” – in red, which Chinese culture associates with fire. The characters are sparse near the top of the piece and become dense at the bottom, as if the red, which Western culture associates with blood, is pooling – approximately 1200 Chinese laborers died because of the treacherous working conditions.
China Pattern would never be commissioned today – not for a federal building, at any rate. Its salute to the immigrant workforce would not be tolerated in this Brave New World we live in, one in which recognizing the contributions of people of non-European descent is considered DEI and therefore not acceptable. As a statement that serves not only as a lesson regarding a specific period in US history, but also as a rallying cry against what is the contemporary environment in this country, it is more relevant now than it was when Oropallo painted it, more than a quarter century ago.
1 See Moving Pictures (March 5, 2020) and Not Your Grandmother’s American Gothic (July 30, 2023).
2 The courthouse opened at 501 I Street in 1999 and in 2005 was renamed the Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse. Matsui, a second-generation Sacramento native whose earliest memories were of the internment camp where he spent his first few years, served in the House of Representatives from 1979 until he passed away in 2005.
3 A year after China Pattern, Oropallo had already moved on from this method of working. Although she continued to utilize silkscreens as part of the process in making her paintings, the period in which she made the rail and other related pieces didn’t last long. However, during this short time, she made work that was not only unlike the silkscreen paintings of both Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg – two artists who pioneered its use in fine art – but unlike any silkscreen paintings I’d seen before.