“Target/Shalom,” the first piece you see in the exhibit Loring Cornish: In Each Other’s Shoes, stands in the central gallery at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. On the “Target” side, you see sepia photos of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy repeated Warhol-style. The dozens of faces are behind irregular rectangles of glass framed by shards of mirrors decorated, 1960s-like, with red bubbles; it’s as if the men are staring at you across time through the windows of a high-rise housing project.

On the first Thursday afternoon of this month, Cornish himself was standing next to the piece, explaining that it was intended for a major show at Morgan State University the same month as Barack Obama’s inauguration. The exhibit was meant to be a reflection on the struggles of African-Americans, with pieces about the March on Washington, lynchings, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But an unexpected incident altered the focus of the whole show.

“I drove out to the home of Ellen and Paul Saval to install two pieces of art they had purchased,” Cornish says. “And during the few hours I was there, I felt like I had gained two close friends, like they were kindred spirits. Ellen had cooked a meatloaf dinner, but I had to get back home to work on the Morgan show, so she packed it up as a sandwich. As I drove home, I took one bite of that sandwich and I knew I had to include the Jewish struggle in my show. We hadn’t even talked about anything Jewish, but just being in their presence let me know that the Jewish struggle was the same as our struggle. The first thing I did when I got home was take this,” and here he gestured to “Target,” “off the wall. I flipped it over and started working on a new piece on the other side. I had a feeling I couldn’t negate, and when I have an idea like that, I don’t question it. I just go with it.”

Cornish, a tall, trim man with a bald dome and a green South Beach T-shirt, walked around the piece to the “Shalom” side. The title word was spelled out in colored glass marbles, surrounded by wiggly strips of mirror and glass, the latter painted on the underside in bright blotches of color. The same red-bubble mirror from the other side formed three doves flying above the letters. The large, two-sided mosaic was mounted on a rusty, wrought-iron stand with a metal wreath that echoed the peace sign in “Shalom.”

“I thought the word ‘shalom’ was so appropriate because that’s what those three men were all about—bringing peace to the land,” Cornish says. “The second side felt like a completion of what I had started on the first side. I had wanted to make a big statement as an artist, and by adding the Jewish aspect, it didn’t seem so one-sided, so selfish, just about me. It seemed more universal.”

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