National Mythstory Book Review

On February 18, 2016, my daughter and I saw National Mythstory (Abstract) by Bryan Anthony Moore in the upstairs gallery of the BSU Student Union Building. Moore is expressing his distain towards Texas and the fallacies within their textbooks, specifically the 2014 edition. His mixed medium use of ceramic sculptures, various graphite work on a selection of paper such as tea stained and burned and aged, and an oil painting made the exhibit very interesting and unique for me. He even used something called ‘bullshit ink’, an ink concoction created from bull feces to represent “the bullshit passing for History in Texas public schools”. (citation)

While I enjoyed the entire collection, I was drawn to a couple specific pieces. The first was a freestanding

Throughout history, rules and/ or the church commissioned work to control the masses, giving them visual rules and regulations on how they should live to make it to heaven. I feel Moore is taking somewhat of an opposite approach where he is displaying his disgust to those who are trying to manipulate and control society. Moore is bringing attention to the fact that Texas, one of the biggest history book suppliers for public education, has been altering our history for years. History as we’ve been taught isn’t exactly what happened, instead it is what the authors and publishers want history to be. In an education foundation course I took, we studied this extensively; the history we know is not the history of the United States, instead it is the history per Texas. Things have been altered, subtracted, or painted pretty to educate American’s in history they want us to know, not exactly the history we had. This is no different than historical artwork. For example, the image of Christ was created by some artist or commission of the first iconography of Christ. While we are unaware where this came from, this is the image we’ve used for thousands of years. Mary Magdalene and the Resurrected Christ from the Rubbula Gospels from Late Antiquity, Masaccio’s Tribute Money from the Renaissance, even Peter Paul Ruben’s Elevation of the Cross from the Baroque period displays Christ as slender, somewhat tanned with a full brown beard and brown longer hair. He’s either dressed in the traditional Roman Toga, or we see him bare chested on the cross. Is this what Christ looks like or is this the image the church has wanted us to know. This to me is no different than the Texas schoolbooks, is the history we’ve been told the truthful history or simply what they want us to