American artist
Malcolm Bailey (1947–2011) was an American artist. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Early life and education.
Bailey was born in Harlem in 1947. He studied at the High School of Art and Design in New York and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He undertook residencies at Yaddo in Silver Springs, New York and the McDowell Colony in Petersbourgh, New Hampshire.
Work.
Bailey is best known for his "Separate but Equal" series made in the late 1960s: large scale paintings that appropriated and adapted eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist diagrams of the cargo ships that transported enslaved people from Africa to Jamaica.
The title of this series refers to the school desegregation case, "Brown vs. Board of Education" (1954) which overturned "Plessy vs. Ferguson" (1896), an earlier ruling that underpinned segregation in the U.S. as a system of 'separate but equal' for blacks and whites. Bailey himself said 'real revolution won't occur until poor whites as well as poor blacks realize they are oppressed', a position that art historian Cheryl Finley argues is epitomised by the black and white figures in the "Separate but Equal" paintings, who, as she writes, 'mirror and double each other, duplicating the same painful postures in the oppressive confines of a slave ship.'