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A founding Freewheelers member and a prolific artist celebrated for his “ethereal visualizations of life across the Black Diaspora,” Gerald Duane Coleman (b. 1948) has been a key figure in Milwaukee’s Black Arts Movement. Often mixing whimsy, social realism, and protest, Coleman leans toward whimsy in his “Blue Gorilla” series.
As Coleman explained, his blue gorillas were “based on those familiar luminaries of the Milwaukee County Zoo,” where he “spen[t] several hours each week …, studying and sketching Samson and Tanga.” Contrary to common misconceptions about the “hulking but gentle and intelligent” gorilla, Coleman admired his subject as “a shy, unaggressive vegetarian who cherishes his family and fights only when threatened,” and commented that “the world would be better off … [i]f man would take on more of [the gorilla’s] attributes.” Thus, the viewer finds Coleman’s blue gorillas “doing the most delicately civilized actions—eating berries, picking daisies, playing with butterflies.”
Coleman's love letter to the Milwaukee County Zoo joins other works in celebrating the places and public institutions that help connect us and anchor our social infrastructure: the library (Edgar Jeter’s “Girl Reading”), the Mitchell Park Domes (Frankie B. Cole's "Red Tropical Circle"), and neighborhoods and front stoops (Sylvester Sims’s “Brothers” and its look back to the “warmth, vigor and camaraderie” of 'Old Walnut Street').
Other work by Coleman is on view at the Atkinson, Center Street, and Martin Luther King libraries, and the MPL Digital Collections Milwaukee Black Arts Movement digital collection offers more revealing insight into Coleman as a visionary artist and performer.