Anisa Khalifa

You’re Taking a Walk on The Broadside. Welcome! I’m Anisa Khalifa. This tour is brought to you by The Broadside, a podcast about our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South. It's a weekly program from WUNC, Durham's Public Radio Station.

You're at stop number two of five stops around downtown. Check all of them out on the map right below this audio player on your phone.

This story takes us inside a building that has inspired generations of North Carolinians, including a Durham native who created one of the most iconic pieces of 20th century art:

Jerad Walker

The 90-year-old building in front of you has hosted just about everything: weddings, political rallies, the National Guard. And if you talk to a longtime Durham resident, like Duke University Art History Professor Rick Powell, you'll hear some stories.

Rick Powell

So I've been to the Armory a whole bunch of times for different events. Actually, I also was there for a class to teach puppies how to be good dogs, and we did classes at the Armory where we walked around the outer edge.

Jerad Walker

But this building arguably hit its highest notes in the 1940s and into the sixties when it was a prominent stop on the Chitlin’ Circuit. This was a loose network of Black music venues across the segregated South. During that period, thousands of Black Durhamites came here to dance and listen to live music, including a young man named Ernie Barnes, who would go on to become one of America's most celebrated painters. His most famous work is called The Sugar Shack.

Rick Powell

It's a masterpiece. In some ways, he put Durham on the map with that painting.

Jerad Walker

And that's because The Sugar Shack depicts a scene inspired by one of the dances held inside this very building.

Rick Powell

And you can see the rafters in the room. Um, you can see the second levels in the room, which tips us off for those of us who know Durham, that it is the Armory 'cause that's exactly the architecture of the Armory.

Jerad Walker

Rick says It also carries a subtle political message because all of the musicians and dancers in the painting are Black.

Rick Powell

And despite segregation, Black people finding joy and energy and excitement in their lives. They defy reality, they bend, they twist, they angle themselves.

Jerad Walker

And that was Ernie Barnes's superpower. He had an uncanny ability to paint people in impressionistic motion. Rick says it likely came from his unusual background as a high level athlete.

Barnes attended North Carolina Central University in Durham as an art student, but he also played college football there. And later, professionally.

Rick Powell

I'm a firm believer that his early life, walking through the streets of Durham playing pickup games, ultimately, um, playing football, all of that impacts his career as an artist. I think he looks at bodies, he looks at limbs, he looks at, akimbo arms and angles and knees and elbows.

He did that his whole career and he found an interesting way of translating all of that observation into these painted images.

Robert Trowers

It probably was somewhat influenced by the music as well.

Jerad Walker

Robert Trowers is the Director of Jazz Studies across town at Ernie Barnes' alma mater, N.C. Central.

Robert Trowers

The music that was coming out of places like The Armory with music that had a certain kind of dynamism to it. In the ‘50s for sure, you know, there would still have been a really large, vibrant sort of jazz and blues audience for those kinds of artists.

Jerad Walker

And that is what you see and what you can almost feel in The Sugar Shack. It's more than just a snapshot in time. It captures the rhythm.

Robert Trowers

I guess you could almost call it earthy eloquence. I think it portrays more than a photo could, really.

Jerad Walker

Which might explain why it was so beloved by a legendary musician. In 1976, at the height of his fame, Marvin Gaye used the Sugar Shack as the cover art for his album I Want You.

Art historian Rick Powell says that this cemented the painting–and in a small way, this building–in popular culture.

Rick Powell

Because on one hand it's a very specific narrative around the Durham Armory, but we can step back from it and say that Ernie Barnes was also thinking about a moment: the early 1970s at the height of the Black Arts Movement with musicians and dancers and writers and poets all really doing their thing. And this painting is an extension of all of that. So it's both Durham and the world.

Anisa Khalifa

This story was made by Jared Walker, a regular voice on The Broadside, a podcast from WUNC about the culture, history, and interesting quirks of North Carolina. You can listen to our weekly episodes anywhere you listen to podcasts.

This project is made possible thanks to the support of Discover Durham

You can check out more at wunc.org/walking.