I came up here and I said yeah this is
where I want to be because it was the
opposite of New York. This kind of green,
idyllic place. We had some neighbors who
had moved up here
Archie Shepp and his wife. He was
teaching at University of Massachusetts.
Of course, a great saxaphone player. And that was
the time when Max Roach was also
teaching at the University of
Massachusetts. So I knew a little bit
about the area. The people I met when I
was here and some women who are also
looking at the school, I said these in
my people these are the people that I felt
comfortable with and just jumped in.
I don't think I really thought about at
the time,
co-education is going to be rocky road or this
is historic. I just enjoyed the people
I met, I loved the area and i said I'm
going to go for it.
I came from an arts high school, now
called Laguardia. It's a public high school
dedicated to all the Arts in New York
City. While I was in high school, I
was studying art history. But in art
history, you know, you're going to an
urban public high school it's very
diverse, but somehow in the book they're
not diverse. I thought well this is
not really right. So I come to Amherst and I
had the opportunity to do independent
studies where I interviewed some of the
people that I knew. They happen to be
Norman Lewis they happen to be
Jack Witten. These are people I knew growing up.
My interdisciplinary major was in
Spanish, Black Studies and Fine Arts.
That was the way I figured out how I
could study the art of these different
people. I just knew it was important
because I knew these people existed. So I
was able to explore. I mean, I think that
was one of the great things that Amherst gave me.
Before I graduated I had an
internship at the Studio Museum in
Harlem. I then went back there to work
when I graduated and started my career there.
I didn't really think about being
professor I just thought about working
with objects and and basically with
living artists. Many institutions in the
United States collected the work of
African-American artists and Latin
American artists in the sixties and
seventies when they were hit with
protests. People said, you know, we we need to
diversify this. Some of these things that
I've shown over the years have been in
storage for 40 years. Now they're
pristine condition that's good news.
But now they're being shown,
because somebody wrote about them,
somebody showed them,
somebody said hey these are important things.
It's an amazing honor to be selected and
it's, you know, you just work everyday and
you enjoy what you do. But that it's
really made an impact on the world.
I said I wanted to be a diplomat
when I came here and that didn't quite
work out for me but I was still able to
do all the things I love. I was at a
conference in Johannesburg in November
and I happened to meet the ambassador to
South Africa at that time. Patrick Gaspard,
a great man. I told my story and
he said, "but you have been doing it."
you've been doing cultural diplomacy
all this time.
And you say, wow! Yeah I guess so.