Painting “Cakewalk” was no cakewalk, said artist Dana Saxerud. For two years, she worked on the painting, putting the finishing touches on it, then starting up again.
“It hung on the wall, I’d signed it, then I took it off and started working on it again,” said Saxerud, an Arlington resident and member of the Arlington Artists’ Alliance.
The painting, now hanging in the Judicial Suites of the Arlington Courthouse, stemmed from a chance encounter with a newspaper photo. A still taken from a film in the Library of Congress archives, the photo showed up alongside TV listings in 1999, illustrating a story on a documentary about turn-of-the-19th-century New York City.
The photo, and the film, showed young African-American girls, all dressed in white dresses, competing in a cakewalk, a dance competition for a cake, in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Saxerud watched the documentary, hoping to learn more about the scene.
“This was three or four seconds out of an hour,” she said. “I don’t know how they decided to use it” to illustrate a story on the documentary.
But her imagination was sparked, and Saxerud began a painting based on the photo.
<b>IN THE LATE</b> 19th century, cakewalks were not dances to be performed by young girls. The cakewalk was a ragtime dance, begun by African-American dancers. As in the photo that inspired Saxerud, the cakewalk was usually part of a competition, with the best dancers walking away with a prize cake.
In 1898, poet Paul Dunbar collaborated with Will Marion Cook, an African-American composer, on “Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk.” The musical opened in New York with an all-black cast.
Saxerud said she sometimes ponders the setting for the photo she saw. Given the dresses, she has wondered if the girls were coming from church.
That’s possible, but not likely, said Marilyn Mobley McKenzie, founder of the African-American Studies Department at George Mason University.
“I don’t associate [the dance] with church,” said McKenzie. “I associate a cakewalk with a secular dance.”
With the popularity of the dance, it also became a symbol of African-Americans. The dance was used in minstrel shows, and given racist names.
<b>HOPEFULLY, SAXERUD SAID,</b> her painting will strike a more equalizing tone, both for cakewalks and for art. “We need more images of black people” leading their daily lives, she said.
Too often, she said, depictions of African-Americans in representational painting have come as relics of slavery, showing African-Americans in the South.
“I love John Singer Sargent, and he has a wonderful painting of young black girls,” said Saxerud. “But unfortunately, it shows them picking cotton.”
She also tried to reflect her own life in “Cakewalk.” “These girls are real, they existed,” said Saxerud. But their faces aren’t clear in the photo, and no further information exists about the film.
Growing up in Anne Arundel County, Md., Saxerud said she remembered integration. “I went to elementary school one day, and my mother told me, ‘There are going to be some kids who look a little different,’” she remembered. “I got to school at the beginning of second grade, and there were some little black girls there.”
So Saxerud added new faces to the girls in the painting. “These faces are the faces of girls I went to school with,” she said. “It gives these girls some identity.”