Kevin Says: Black like me,art,race and baggage

So I will seek to clarify this a bit

I won’t go into post black…..

Just yesterday I met with a group of artist and students for the city with out walls mentoring program. This program takes high school students and pairs them with working artist.

My group of friends decided that instead of working alone we would pool our resources and provide the students with maximum exposure to artist.

The Artist were Jerry Gant an African American, forty something, he is a performance artist, a graffiti pioneer, a working artist, who paints, sculpts and more.

Kevin Darime an artist, a painter and more….. he is thirty something, originally from Trinidad and is a cool guy, with a sex and the city slant.

Then me a beat up fifty some thing African American, ex-cop sculptor painter and lunatic.

The Students are first generation American, one was born in the United States, and his family is from Nigeria. Smart kid with a bright future.

The other kid is black and Puerto Rican, from Newark smart and hell also.

My student is Haitian, born in Haiti, but raised in the United States since he was a baby.

None of these students who are first generation Americans, knew much about their past.

Our first advice to all of them was to go home, find your parents, find your history and we can work from there.

When we spoke of race, jerry and I were on the same page. Even though are backgrounds are very different. We are both invested in African American history and servicer to the community.

Kevin D,. Who is of a different generation was freed of the constraints of the baggage of race and more that both Jerry and I carry around.

I looked at his wonderful work on his wall at his studio.

Amazing work, free of or in spite of race.

I looked around this room and realized that these young people are the new African Americans. The African kid wasn’t any different that any of the African American kids that you might have met in a good school in Newark. The Puerto Rican, black kid was like so many I have met, American. The Haitian kid who parents still speak Creole in the house, was hesitant to even say he was Haitian. When I first asked him where his family was from he said American

These are the new African Americans………….

Are they as African American as I am, can they be with out the baggage of slavery, and of the civil rights movement………can they be

Of course it’s not about me decided, they decided…………..

And it fits

I am from another time and a different place…………..

I just wrote my blog stating that I wanted to explore all of the things that I have been deprived of by virtue of my age, sex and race.

I grew up an African American in a country that didn’t love me.

I grew out as an outsider exposed to the same things as white kids, but never really being a part of the American Dream

The election of Obama has freed me in many ways.

Do I feel as thought there is a race problem in America?

Of course

Race it is an American thing, as American as Apple Pie as H.Rap brown long ago said.

But it is just as convoluted around the world, race class and skin color.

It’s not an American thing but a color thing, just as much of a problem in Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico or Africa as it is here.

So why am I still screaming, why do African Americans feel like they have the lock on oppression……….

Having said that

America it’s my country,

And with the election of Obama, for the first time.

I can fly a flag and be proud

I can shout out my love of America from the hills tops

All the wild being cognizant of the tea party movement and those that would return to

The ways of the past.

I can love America, now with out losing sight of its many imperfections

The civil right movement the black power struggle, required me, and no implored me to make art work that logged on to that struggle

This has informed and hindered my work.

.I grew up like most of American.

No there weren’t that many African American images on the television.

I along with the rest of my people applauded Dianne Carroll in “Julia”.

So I grew up watching Gregory peck in Moby dick.

I watched the grapes of wrath

Read clock work orange, 1984, animal farm, les miserable,

I read and loved, the count of Monte christo

Huckel berry Finn, tom sawyer

I wanted to be a pirate and or a cowboy just like opie in Mayberry

I wanted to By Tom Sawyer not the slave…………….

I wanted to fly in a rocket to the moon

And to stand in a podium on the Washington mall

And say some thing besides I have seen the mountain top

Now we have

Now I can

What am I saying?

That no I am ready to confront to reexamine how these stories and books affected me

I can go back now to the stories of my youth

And reclaim them

Render them,

I can look at

I have to look at all of this stuff once more, as an American

As some one who is included.

No race is still a mess

But slowly

I am being freed from the restraints of addressing this portion of my child hold

With out quite frankly feeling like a “uncle tom”

Am I rushing to leave race art, no as long as I am black their will still be some struggle

In my work

But for now I just want to explore what it is like to be an artist

I wonder if the world will be receptive

No I am not a 30 some thing sex in the city artist

I am not a skate board carrying member of the new generation of face book artist

I am a old Negro………..who had watched from the sidelines for years

I am now seeking to reclaim a part of the American story that was denied to me for so long

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