By Howard Pousner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Some doubters advised Louis Delsarte not to enter the competition for a commission to create a massive mural honoring Martin Luther King Jr. The epic scope the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs’ Public Art Program was seeking was too big, and the artist's fee too small, they cautioned.

But Delsarte, a prominent Atlanta artist and an art and humanities professor at King's alma mater, Morehouse College, heard other voices that were more persuasive.

There was the voice of his late father Louis, a New York City public school guidance counselor and coach of underprivileged kids, who idolized King and, his son thought, even favored him. And there was the voice of his cousin, retired journalist and civil rights advocate Ken Wibecan, who told the painter he’d be a fool not to create a very public tribute to “one of the greatest human beings on the face of this earth.”

But, perhaps loudest of all, Delsarte heard his own voice, the voice of a self-described hard-headed man. Now 65, he had walked to his Brooklyn high school repeating lines from King’s speeches in his head, daydreaming that he too could deliver oratory with such fervor. He heard that teenaged boy’s still-emerging voice, too.

And so on Sunday, Louis Delsarte’s 125-foot-long Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Mural will be dedicated at Peace Plaza opposite the entrance to the MLK National Historic Site’s visitors center.

The artist refers to his creation as a “filmstrip of King’s life. It’s like a running account, an allegory of the people who made up his world.”

The robustly hued narrative begins with King’s green-leafed Auburn Avenue childhood and ends with the blue-skied promised land of which the civil rights leader prophesied in his final speech the day before an assassin's bullet took his life in 1968.

Across 25 5-by-10-foot steel panels, Delsarte chronicles the entwined story of King and the civil rights movement, from the assassination of Emmett Till to Bull Connor's attacking police dogs. The mural is populated by dozens of faces, from Rosa Parks to Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X to Nina Simone.

But beyond history there is also artistry, the unique visual voice of Delsarte, a Pratt Institute-educated artist inspired by abstract expressionism, German expressionism and the African-American narrative art of heroes including Jacob Lawrence and Hale Woodruff.

All of these influences are evident in the mural he spent a year and a half researching, repeatedly refining and executing. It’s a creation so substantial that last summer he even hosted a community painting day where dozens of volunteers colored inside (and sometimes outside, alas) his lines. The motion and emotion-filled piece traverses the 39 years of King’s private and public life, visually unified by recurring leafy branches, red-brick buildings, protest posters and commercial signs, and Jackson Pollock-like paint splatters.

“It was a crazy notion,” Delsarte said of the mural’s scope. “One of the other finalists [for the commission] was going to do a large photographic thing where they glued a giant photo on the wall. I ended up doing 25 original paintings, with the help of the community.”

The soft-spoken, introspective Delsarte, whose works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, says the $45,000 commission covered materials, studio space rent, storage and other expenses. He shrugs when asked if he regrets, in essence, donating his fee.

“Being an artist, you do things that are not so practical,” he said. “My daughter Rachel [a 16-year-old Atlanta Girls School junior], I did it for her.”

Eddie Granderson, Atlanta's public art program manager, said, “I’ll be the first to say we got a deal. I was surprised he was willing to do this large a painting for that amount of money, and Louis should be recognized for his willingness. I think he felt a personal obligation to do it.”

The King Historic Site visitors center attracts 700,000 a year, Granderson said, so the exposure Delsarte’s mural will receive will be “a reward in itself. … It’s just like being onstage at Carnegie [Hall].”

Delsarte doesn’t disagree. In fact, the prominent placement stresses him a little.

Earlier this week, the day before the mural was to be installed on the back wall of the Martin Luther King Jr. Natatorium, he paced the floor at the spartan Studioplex space where helpers were applying last-minute touches to panels.

He fretted that folks close to the King family and the movement, expecting photorealism, wouldn’t get his expressionistic interpretation. He worried whether if, in omitting the face of Barrack Obama, he'd left out perhaps the ultimate representation of King’s legacy.

Sounding weary and a tad insecure, he asked a first-time visitor, “What’s your impression of the mural so far?” The newcomer, staring at the vivid but disconnected puzzle pieces lining the walls and filling the floor, instead asked the artist if he felt he had succeeded.

“I don’t know,” Delsarte said quietly. “I don’t know if I let Martin Luther King down. I wanted to do so much about what his legacy was about, it became a struggle to measure up to who he was.”

Event preview

Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Mural dedication, 2 p.m. Sunday, Peace Plaza, Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site visitors center, 450 Auburn Ave. Mayor Kasim Reed will be among the speakers. www.ocaatlanta.com/king-mural