Black faced, clad in clown garb, and wielding a hammer, a frightening figure approaches with a manic grimace. To our modern eyes, the image appears racist and insensitive: that, in part, is the artist’s point. This painting is one in a series of fictional circus posters in which black figures perform stereotypical roles. In this specific work, the artist criticizes the notion that black men are violent figures in society.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demeaning stereotypes of African Americans appeared throughout popular culture, reducing people to grotesque, childlike, or threatening caricatures. By unearthing this imagery in his paintings, Michael Ray Charles reveals how America’s past representations of black people continue to influence today’s portrayals and prejudices.

Charles affixed a penny alongside his signature in the bottom left corner of the painting. This gesture carries a charged meaning: the penny is the coin with lowest value and the only coin that is a different color from the others in the standard American monetary system.