Preview of the series "Can't we stick together?"

Last semester I started this series of Untitled drawings called"Can't we stick together?" I started this project with just the drawings, and I sort of put it to the side for a while so that I could focus on the Yellowbone piece and the other works. This semester I re-visited them and found so much in each drawing that I hadn't seen before. I found a way to express how I was feelings about the colorism issue in a way that felt right to me, using flesh tone color pencils( There is a funny story of my buying all of these different flesh tone pencils at my local art supply store. The black guy at the register inquired as to what type of project was requiring me to buy so many "black skin tones." I replied by saying I was working on a colorism project, he smiled while saying "hmmm... that's sounds interesting") Originally,  when I was making these drawings I had a different mindset about what they were suppose to mean. They were suppose to be the "answer" to the problem. Then as I began to do so much extensive research on the subject, I felt overwhelmed by the complexity of everything. I realized how deeply embedded this concept has been implanted within our culture, nearly 400  years ago!! So I felt this sense of reality of how huge this issue really was. I imagined the fact that so many black people of darker complexion have died believing a lie, that because of their complexion they weren't beautiful or capable of succeeding. I really hated the fact that our society has almost built an extensive concept around  this to keep their false idea into existence. I mourned the fact that so many people deal with these issues, even me! So I started drawing these "answer" pieces to show how we could reverse the curse. As niave (this is the word my old mentor Jane Marsching used when I talked about this with her) as this concept may sound, I really have a passion for all black people to love how God created them no matter how culture has tried to polute us. It's just that serious to me. I realize that friendships have ended, families have been broken, and people have lived in depression over skin tone because of the lie of colorism. So if I seem obsessed with this concept it's because it's real.

 Sunanda Sunyal, one of our MFA faculty, made a statement about my work at the last residency about colorism being a internal issue (inside the black community), and he questioned why I'd want to talk about it. Now given please believe that I respect Sunanda, but I felt that question was so disconnected from the stories that I put together in the colorism spread. Anyone who read that piece would understand the necessity to discuss this type of topic, regards of how much people don't like to talk about it because it's painful. But I had a lot of trouble dealing with that statement, because to me it was an excuse to not say what you feel. I don't think we can afford in this day in age to not say and speak our hearts( in love of course), and I've made up in my mind that I'm going to continue to discuss the issues that require us to step into righteousness. 

I recently finished reading a book called Cane River by Lalita Tademy( it was on Oprah's Book club list some years ago). It was a really good read to me because the author Lalita, had done extensive research on her family history and wrote a fiction novel based on her research findings. This was a creative approach to me, and I actually started some years ago doing something similar though I had no idea about Ms. Tademy. Maybe you'll see it published one of these days. But anyway, it was a great projection of this idea that "light is better,"stemming back to the time of slavery. The women in her family made significant decisions in the story to have relationships with white French men in Lousiana, and produce in some cases a dozen mulatto children from their extended relationships. They seemed to do this to gain wealth and access to priviledge, only to be betrayed when the same men would deny those same children as being reasonable heirs to their inheritance. It was a tragedy to see these women believe that they would have a better chance in life( in which some of them did though bitterly), and to find out tradegically that they were still black no matter how light they were. It was also interesting to see some of their offspring choose to pass because of this frustration. All in all the book was a engaging read, and I found it to be helpful to look at the history of colorism in America. The story also caused me to think of a film I saw some years ago called  "A Feast of All Saints"(2001) which even intersects with references of the creole of color on Cane River. There are other films I could name as well, but it's all very interesting. Well, I'll be sure to pause here for the moment and we will continue on later. Stay tuned to some new upcoming images...on the next blog post.