Derek Mason has been the new head football coach at Vanderbilt University for just a few months. For over a generation one off-campus tradition has been to paint a mural of the head coach on the side of a local business. Generally this occurs without controversy. Until, that is, the local chapter of the Vanderbilt NAACP took issue with the painting and started a petition to have it changed. The issue?Read about the issue here. Personally, I think that the Vanderbilt NAACP should take a chill pill - In my visual opinion, this is not the case of the artist (Michael Cooper) wanting to portray Mason as in the "era in which black people's skin was darkened and their lips were made whiter in order to exaggerate their race in order to put them in a sharp contrast with the white race."
This is just partially a case of Cooper working from a photo (and never meeting the subject), but mostly a really bad mural painting in this Vanderbilt example, as Cooper seems like an otherwise quite apt muralist.
That lady who "restored" that ancient Christ fresco in that church in Spain and made The Christ look like someone from the Planet of the Apes still has the prize for the worst portrait ever...
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