then Birmingham actually had my first experience that made me think that I wanted to be an artist and
I had that experience when I was in Kindergarten even though at the time I couldn't name
The profession as an artist, but I knew I wanted to make pictures like some pictures
I had seen in the scrapbook that my kindergarten teacher kept in the classroom. So that was the
Experience. I had then
and and and I think it's meaningful that I was born where I was born and the
political and Social climate of
Birmingham Alabama was the climate that it was and that we moved to Watson, California
and then we I grew up mostly [in] South Central and
so I went through [a] period in which I had to was sort of Witness to the
Shootouts between the black Panthers [and] the La police Department from [that] Central Avenue
and
Walk [Outs] [and] Rallies and kids set in the school on fire
During the black student Union movement period So it's like if you keep seeing all those kinds of things
It shapes your perception of the world and so and because I had met an artist named Charles [white]
Who did a lot of work [that] seemed to have had a kind of social?
He was committed to some social kind of transformation through the use of his artwork and he was interested in an artist like Kathe
Kollwitz [you] know who and some of the german expressionist artists whose work was also kind of embedded in a political reality?
Over time I started to think well. That's what artists do this is when I really started to
consider this idea of
visibility and invisibility
You know presence and absence and the [kind] of simultaneity
The condition as it relates to black people, so there are two versions of the story of the invisible man
you're one written by HG wells in which the
character becomes completely transparent and invisible
But the one by Ralph Ellison in his description of the condition of invisibility as it relates to black people is that it's not
The sort of retinal kind [in] [visibility] where you can't be seen it's a psychological invisibility. That's imposed
by a culture that doesn't particularly care [to] see
you and certainly doesn't care to see you in the fullness of who you are and
So reading that
that book and in particular the prologue to the book really is what set up this kind of
exploration of for me of this sort of simultaneous capacity of being and not-being
being present and absent the first picture
I made that used the black the image of a black figure painted in black against the black background
where you know you try to figure out a way [to]
Create some separation between the image and the ground by changing the color temperature of the two different blacks you would use
So that's really the first time I'd use an image and it
really came out of
out of reading invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The [souvenir] Paintings were all a part of an exhibition
I did at the renaissance society in Chicago, and it was really a way of trying to
come to terms with
this another duality, so
when people think about the civil rights movement they think of the
We shall overcome the March on Washington Martin Luther King, Jr.
And the Southern Christian leadership conference they that's what's popular in the minds of most
people in the painting there's a banner on the
Wall of that room that has the image of John Kennedy Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.. Who became?
in effect sort of like a holy trinity of
The Civil rights, Era
all three of them
assassinated within the
1960s and so they were martyrs to
to social progress
But in the Frieze across the top you have images of other people
within the Black liberation Struggle and
The Civil Rights movement who also died at the same time that the Kennedys [and] Martin Luther king died
But they didn't get anywhere near the kind of popular commemoration
So in a sense the souvenir paintings become I used them as a kind of an annunciation painting
and it really is a kind of call to remember all these people and their contribution to the
To that to the period of the 1960s on both sides of the equation on this
nonviolent sided equation and on the
black liberation side of
the equation that
Preserves the right to use violence. If it was necessary, and that's where Malcolm x's
Phrase you know we want freedom, but how do we want it by any means necessary. I'm
acutely aware of
the general absence of black figures in the center of the narrative of any of the pictures that become the
Foundation of our history we know and that's through almost all the periods of art history for the last
five or six hundred years
[now] all that
Those foundational images if we say from the early renaissance take a otto and piero Della
FrancesCa and all those artists through layering out of the Vinci and Michelangelo
Raphael all those artists all the way up you keep moving through the history of art
The black figure is not the image that you expect to see when you think about any of that work
They are black people in some of those narratives
And especially in some of the Christian narratives where there's the tradition of the black mage [eye]
So the position is one of those keep one of those kings from the east as a black figure
but that's not
the Central focus or thrust of the narrative
Neither when you get to your 18th and 19th
Century French painting you know and in particular I looked at the Rococo and things like that. We are not
the center [of] those subjects
We are usually not the object of desire
In those pictures and so one of the ways you can bring the black figure from the Margin to the center in
Relationship to that art history is to use those classical models
as A
structure and as a frame and place the black figure in a picture that
Operates on the same terms that those pictures do in that suite
That's based on the rococo paintings in this in this show is actually based specifically on the fraud and art painting the swing
It would be one thing to take the frog and our painting and put a black woman in the swing
Well, that's the sort of simple way of thinking about it. The other way is to kind of
embody the concept of the swing and in the way
I did is I have five paintings that constitute the swing and
So you have two figures in the picture [a] black man lifting a black woman and swinging her around and a 360 degree rotation
that's a swing -
So that's a way of referring back to the frog and I are painting without having to reproduce the frog on [art] painting
And then sent and placing the black figure in the middle in the [center] of the picture as a subject
It's one thing to stand by and admire the work of other people
The moment that I recognize the greatness of those things it is unacceptable for me
to not also try to match
the sophistication and complexity and the appeal [of] those works
By doing it but doing it with images that have people who look like me in it
There are other people who are doing critical analyses of culture and their writing and they're talking about those things
But you need the [Missis] that we live in a material world in
Which the things we see?
determine what our shape our expectations and
That's the thing so in the art world
if I go back to that model
if I keep going to the museum and only seeing white bodies and pictures when I go to the museum
Then I don't expect to [see] black bodies in the Museum
because then I don't think they belong there, but if I make black bodies
And those new black bodies end up in a museum - and you come to the museum and I go to the museum I see
Black bodies, I see white bodies. I see Asian bodies
I see latino bodies, then I don't have this then when I go to the museum
I expect to see those kinds of things every time I go that matters a lot
David Walker was A
free black man living in the in Boston area
[who] wrote a Pamphlet?
Called the David Walker's appeal to the colored people of the world and in particular those of the United States
[and] that was it was a critique of the
condition of black people in the world at the time as he saw it and an
Analysis of and a Critique of the decorate the hypocrisy of the declaration of independence
You know in a country that claims to be built on the principles of freedom and Liberty?
But at the same time the people who were writing that thing were owning slaves and peart buying and selling people like they were
cows and sheep
It's like well
He said there was something wrong with that and so in in a way. I say the same thing in a
world in which the notion of
Equality is supposed to be the dominant Model
And that everybody is supposed to have equal access to an equal capacity
We don't still see a world that has that kind of equality yet and that
Everybody is represented at the table or represented in the Museum
we don't see a world that's like that yet, and so to the degree that I'm
invested in sort of making that
Equality [a] reality you could say that I'm a lot like David Walker
you