(Music Playing)
There's lots of levels on which my
paintings can be approached.
One can approach it as simply an object
that has a certain kind of beauty.
One can approach it as an object that has
a text in it that has different levels of
legibility.
(Silence)
If one knows James Baldwin and realizes
that the text in my painting is from an
essay that he's written, then that opens up
the painting; gives it a different level of
meaning.
(Silence)
The paintings that address the Million Man
March were made in the mid '90's,
a couple of years after Louis Farrakahn,
the leader of the Nation of Islam
organized a march on the mall in
Washington, D.C. about the visibility and
presence of black men in the country,
which I find rather ironic, since
black people have been in this country
since the beginning, before there was even
a country, but we still feel the need to
assert our personhood.
(Silence)
The irony of this march, perhaps, was that
black women were encouraged to absent
themselves from work, but not to attend
the march as full participants.
When I started to think about making silk-
screen paintings using images of the march,
this kind of notion of absence or
disappearance of women was something I
was interested in and something I tried
to find in the images themselves.
(Silence)
Like any artwork, things become richer
if you know more about them,
but I don't think that's crucial.
Someone can walk into a museum and not
know a single thing about a Jackson Pollock
painting and still have a reaction to it;
still get something from it. The thing
that they get from it may be richer if they
know more about it, but that's like
anything (laughter), you know, that's
about being in the world.
(Silence)
(Music Playing)