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Artist Arnold Mesches knew the FBI had watched him.

“I would look out the window of my studio at 10 o’clock at night, and they would be there, and I would wave at the car,” Mesches recalls.

He just didn’t know how long and how closely he had been watched — until he asked for his surveillance files 11 years ago under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mesches received more than 760 pages of documents covering 27 years, from 1945 to early 1972.

“I knew that they were following me, but to the extent that they did, it was pretty shocking,” Mesches says.

The files date from an era when Cold War worries stoked anti-communist paranoia and investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee and U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

They reported on Mesches marching against the Un-American Activities committee, demonstrating for peace, being jailed for picketing during the 1946-47 Hollywood motion picture strike.

They also reported plenty of trivia, including where his children were born.

Although most names had been blacked out, Mesches realized that reports came not only from agents, but also from friends, neighbors, models and former lovers. One student photographed his class with a camera in his necktie.

“You know how you have mice in the closet? That’s about the way I felt,” Mesches said.

Yet those bold, black strokes that redacted much of the documents’ typed text caught his artist’s eye, reminding him of Franz Kline color sketches.

They inspired him to turn the files into art.

He copied them onto acid-free paper and combined them in collages with news clippings, sketches, photographs and acrylic paintings of popular images of the era.

He gave them decorative borders in the style of “contemporary illuminated manuscripts.”

“I made historical documents in the same way that illuminated manuscripts of the old days are historical documents,” Mesches says.

Mesches received international media attention with the 2002 debut of “The FBI Files” at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center.

Now, UNCG’s Weatherspoon Art Museum is the 16th venue to host the exhibition. Forty-five pieces from the series fill its Falk and Tannenbaum galleries through Sept. 5.

“This particular body of work still has so much relevance in this age of security, background checking, profiling, the kinds of information that not only the government but all kinds of entities have on us now, from retailers to Facebook,” said Weatherspoon director Nancy Doll.

Now 87, Mesches and his wife, author Jill Ciment, divide their time between New York and Gainesville, Fla., where he paints and teaches at the University of Florida. He will visit the Weatherspoon on Tuesday to talk about “The FBI Files” exhibition.

When today’s younger viewers see his works, “They stand there with their mouths open,” Mesches said. “It’s a revelation. They didn’t believe that the country could do these stupid things.”

Back in the 1940s, Mesches had moved from Buffalo, N.Y., to Los Angeles to accept a scholarship at the Art Center School, then began his fine art career.

FBI files mention his work as a set illustrator in movie studios, a commercial and film strip artist, an art school director and an art director for Frontier, “a magazine unfavorable to the FBI.”

“They started watching everybody,” Mesches recalled. “I was a lefty like everyone else in those days, and this was hysteria against communism like today’s hysteria against the Muslims.”

Was he a Communist Party member? “If being a member means I was fighting for the rights of African Americans and gays and lesbians and being in favor of peace, of course,” Mesches replied. “If it meant the overthrow of the government, no.”

One FBI document referred to peace as a communist slogan. “If you believed in peace, I guess you were a Communist,” Mesches said.

“One informer said that 'I must be a Communist’ because 'I dressed like a Communist,’ 'only wears rolled-up blue jeans, with paint spatters, a T-shirt and an old jean jacket,” he wrote in the exhibition catalog.

For all of the surveillance, “I don’t think they achieved anything,” Mesches said. “I think it was mostly harassment.”

McCarthy’s tactics and accusations about communist infiltration of the federal government and U.S. Army soon were discredited. The last surveillance files that Mesches received date from early 1972; the House Un-American Activities Committee was abolished in 1975.

Reading his FBI files prompted Mesches to create a large acrylic painting titled “Surveillance,” the largest work in his Weatherspoon exhibition.

It depicts popular culture images from the period: the Hollywood strike of the 1940s, Marilyn Monroe, Mad magazine, Malcolm X.

“But I realized that it didn’t have the intimacy of my sitting there and reading the pages and getting goose pimples,” Mesches said.

So he created the series of smaller collages that used file pages.

“He found a way through his art to make public these secret documents and to build an incredible commentary upon culture, social issues, political issues and religious issues,” Doll says.

For the most part, Mesches said, he didn’t pair text to match illustrative images. “In some cases, the images relate, but it’s almost by accident,” he said.

“The FBI Files 45,” for example, pairs his Hollywood strike painting with a document that mentions his arrest for disobeying a court order against mass picketing. The charge was dismissed and changed to disturbing the peace. The union paid his $25 fine.

In images 6, 16 and others, though, he pairs text with images that reflect his life and the times, but purely for aesthetics.

Image 6 shows Korean sailors surrendering (“another war we were ridiculously in,” Mesches says) and American sailors donning masks for a masquerade party. They share the collage with a surveillance report describing how Mesches had attended ethnic food nights.

Nos. 21 and 22 depict the civil rights struggles of African Americans.

In 21, Mesches has painted striking Memphis sanitation workers carrying “I am a man” signs.

For 22, he depicts Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger sparked the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. Her picture appears below his painting of a high heel, a metaphor for the upper class, Mesches says. An accompanying document tries to link Mesches to the Community Party.

The last image, 56, shows an unidentified Southern orator that Mesches painted from a picture in his files. It shares the canvas with an FBI document mentioning a 1961 walk for peace announcement that Mesches had illustrated.

Despite the seriousness of the subject, Mesches says, he relished turning the files into art. And revenge wasn’t his motive.

“It was simply trying to make a historical document of actual facts, to keep these times alive — which is what history is supposed to do.”

Contact Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane at 373-5204 or dawn.kane@news-record.com

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