Perching at the top of a ladder, Joseph Norman, 54, draws a silhouetted human form onto one of hundreds of sheets of paper covering the wall at the Creative Alliance. The figure is the centerpiece of “The Middle Passage Mural,” the most ambitious work of Norman’s long career as an artist.

“It’s the last person to be forced into the door of no return on the slave ships and so it has to look universal, so everyone can get it,” Norman says.

A big man with a touch of gray in his beard, Norman wants his 10-foot-by-100-foot mural to address the Middle Passage—the centuries-long slave trade route by which millions of people in Africa were brought to the New World—in a unique way. “I wanted to take out all of the sentimentality,” he says. “I didn’t want you to feel bad because I look like this person and you look like that person. That doesn’t get us anywhere. There are no perpetrators in this work. To be universal, it has to be hieroglyphic.”

Norman draws on the fierce and visceral visual languages of German expressionism and late Picasso, while struggling with the sheer scale of his subject. “Some people liken this to Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’” he says. “But that was a single event [the Fascist bombing of a town during the Spanish Civil War]. This is the forced relocation of 14 million people over a period of 400 years. You can’t address this subject with something small. You need a symphony.”

Four distinct movements—divided by style and tone as well as the contours of the wall itself—make up this symphony, but within each are 100 individual drawings. From afar, the individual pictures create dense layers. But up close, each image demands attention. At least that’s what the first half of “The Middle Passage Mural” looked like two days after Norman came to Baltimore from the University of Georgia, where he has been teaching drawing and painting since 2002. The wall to the left of the black figure he had just painted was covered by roughly 200 drawings, many of which had been completed at Norman’s studio in Georgia. But everything to the right—nearly 200 blank pieces of paper and a 50-foot stretch of wall—would be finished “in real time,” as Norman put it, which meant that he had less than two weeks before the opening, two weeks to complete several hundred drawings and actualize nine years of planning.

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