.: The Beginning

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The Beginning

So last night I was consolidating some of my old papers into some new containers... Hey one day I may be famous! and they will need to have my papers in some library or museum! OK maybe not... :-)LOL While going through this old box I found an old copy of the Detroit News dated July 23, 1970... I knew just what it was... a clipping from the day I had one my first art contest.

It was a good day that changed my life. My grandmother had gotten us on the Woodward bus going downtown to Kennedy Square. they were having a side walk chalk drawing contest sponsored by the Central Business District Association and the Detroit Children's Museum. The Theme was "I care about Detroit" There were 50 contestants.... I was contestant Number 14. The prize was like $25.00 and a book by the artist Marc Chagall [Russian-born French Painter and Stained Glass Artist, 1887-1985]

I clearly was showing my interest in the automotive industry as I drew a car factory with no pollution coming out of it (wow! an environmentalist too!) The drawing was very technical and accurate for a 10 year old! I don't think my Grandmother thought it was very artistic, " I titled it "A clean factory"... replete with blue sky and sunshine rays painting my positive futuristic view of life. To my surprise they called "14" and I took home the prize!!! I used the money to pay for art lessons that my dad had arranged with Charles Banner, an artist and sign painter by trade, who's shop was right next door to a Gulf station my father owned and operated. Charles seemed like a hard ass when I first started my lessons, he was very strict... and had high expectations and I hated him in the beginning but I soon began to get better and I learned to appreciate his lessons. I learned the lesson of less is more, that I didn't have to draw every detail to make the picture perfect! I never finished all the lessons, but I still remember Charles fondly.

Back to Kennedy Square... I came home a couple of years ago and to my surprise they were raising the square for an office building... not that Detroit needed another building, with so many of them empty... but they were building Campus Marshes across the street which was a new and even bigger square, a la Rockafeller Plaza with a skating rink and all! I cant say Im happy that Kennedy Square is gone, I will always have the memory, the moment I determined I would be an artist. And I am happy that the home town that I love is finally starting to pull it together! Perhaps one day some young child will win a similar contest on the sidewalks of Campus Marshes, I hope they have the same positive out look I had for Detroit!

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com