Movements of the Dance: An Homage to Judith Jamison Print

Fortunate to enter elementary school during an era of progressive school arts education, I have always been interested in culture and the performing arts. My unquenchable curiosity regarding the visual arts started in the primary grades, reading comic books and books about the visual arts, artists, and art history to support my early experimentations using sculpture, drawing and painting media. Understanding and creating images, icons and illustrations have become my life’s work. My love of research and experimentation continues to energize my need to create art. I have come to agree with my teachers and mentors, especially Eva Hamlin Miller, Samella Lewis, and John Biggers who emphasized the authenticity of creating from my own experience and are my direct link to the Harlem Renaissance. Believing art to be a way of life, Miller, Lewis, Biggers and their contemporaries such as Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Arthur Rose and Charles White embraced the Harlem Renaissance ideas of nationalism, cultural consciousness, and preservation that were advocated by leaders and scholars such as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Dubois, and Dr. Alain Locke, a well known scholar of this era who specifically addressed African American artists, urging them to turn to African art and their own heritage for inspiration. For me “Art is a way of life.” Art is how I make my way through the universe, and interact with society and nature. Art is my main way of communicating, and interacting in this world. I create art as a primary means of concretizing the legacy of my existence as part of the forever present moments of time and space [in this universe]. I enjoy creating images, icons and illustrations that voice and document my human journey, work and activity as part of this era. I create art simply because as a being in this universe it is my duty and my privileged freedom to share my individual point of view as part of the greater human collective memory. I also have an unquenchable curiosity regarding our environment, human cultures, homeopathy and herbs, and other such areas of anthropology. I have always observed that “primitive” ancient cultures may be more knowledgeable, well informed and progressive than our modern paradigms. I recognize the importance of understanding human existence on earth and in the universe as a quantum reality of individual, social and cultural identities coexisting to create communities, societies, cultures, nations, and worlds.