Theodore A. Harris, On the Throne of Fire, 2008, mixed media collage

I first came into contact with Theodore Harris when I was given the opportunity to moderate “Art as a Weapon: Critical Thinking and the Media,” the keynote event of Culture Shock 2011 co-organized by QPIRG McGill and the SSMU (Student Society of McGill University). Culture Shock is an annual series of events on McGill University campus focused on the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, communities of colour and indigenous people. This year’s keynote speakers were artists Sundus Abdul Hadi [i] and Theodore A. Harris.

I was born in the U.S. in 1966 to a biracial couple active in the civil rights movement. Our family moved from Boston to Montreal in the early 1970s; however I have always felt a strong cultural connection to Black America and some of my earliest, deepest impressions are of the 1960s in the American northeast, even though I was too young to really remember this time and place. I have found much inspiration in African American art history and especially in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and ‘70s.  My career has transitioned over the past 15 years or so, from social services to community work to a broader cultural work involving community art and education, situated within African diaspora histories of emancipatory education programs initiated from within the community, for the community[ii].

I immediately connected with Theodore’s art and saw it in the tradition of BAM, an impression that was reinforced as I discovered his collaborative work with renowned Black poet-playwright Amiri Baraka[iii].  Following the Culture Shock event in October, Theodore generously agreed to stay in contact with me and to discuss his work and ideas.  The following conversation represents some of the issues we have been engaging with by email and telephone in the past six weeks.

Rosalind: In addition to my appreciation of your artwork Theodore, my motivation for initiating this dialogue is my research, which explores the potential social, cultural and economic benefits of inter-generational art education that is critically and culturally grounded in the lives of Black community members.  My key interests right now are (a) understanding how the notion that visual ‘art isn’t for Black people’ is perpetuated both within the community and in art discourses; and (b) working with other community members to advance student-centered, critical multicultural approaches to art education that work to broaden conceptions of ‘art’ and ‘artist,’ and seek to examine and dismantle the powerful traditions of racism and ethnocentrism ingrained in the histories of Western art and art education.

Last summer I discovered a study by art education scholar William Charland in which he addressed what he described as the “Black avoidance of art as an area of study or career aspiration”[iv].  Charland examined the attitudes and behaviours toward visual art and the career identity of ‘artist’ of fifty-eight African American adolescents from four different high schools.  The teenagers were asked to describe stereotypes what they believed White people attributed to Blacks, and then later in the study were asked to relate widespread stereotypes that people have of artists.  Charland found, for example, a “startling overlap between informants’ understandings of society’s demeaning stereotypes of artists and African Americans” (i.e., both as poor, marginalized, moody, unable to function in ‘normal society’, etc), suggesting that “an African American adolescent who assumes the mantle of artist willingly takes on social stigma aligned with racial stereotypes as well”[v].  The teens also talked about family and community objections to an art career, something I hear often as well, suggesting that stereotype-informed beliefs about artists exist across generations.

So Theodore, given the exclusivity and elitism of formal institutions of art and what Charland describes can you talk about how you became an artist?

Theodore: First I want to thank you for moderating the keynote panel with the great artist Sundus Abdul Hadi and myself as part of the Culture Shock events at McGill University.

This is a great question and one that gets to the heart of some deep concerns for me. I was born in 1966 in Manhattan, New York City, but I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother was a single parent with a drug addiction raising my sister and me, while my father was still in New York dealing with his own addiction (which he did manage to control enough to obtain a degree in social work from NYU).  I say all that to say with all of this dysfunction my parents respected the arts; my mother could draw and play the piano very well, so music was for the most part was dominant art form in our lives, not visual art.  Jazz was always playing and I am very grateful for that because it has had a great influence on my life and work.  You see, my mother also worked at Aqua Lounge Jazz Club on 52nd street in West Philly, where greats like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Art Blakey and The Messengers played and she also hung out with them.  My mom was into music in a deep way and I think music was the thing that made her the most happy.

As early as I can remember I was always drawing, whether I was in school or at home, and my mother always encouraged me to make art, but I don’t remember any one saying you should go to art school, or college period, and this is something I just started thinking about within the last few years—why wasn’t the idea ever put out there? The only person that was, somewhat, of a father figure in my life was my grandfather, who tried to discourage me from the arts.  He knew nothing about the visual arts and for some reason thought art was not reliable, in other words, ‘how can you make money from it?’  At this point I was into graffiti, so one thing he did because I guess he could see I was not giving it up, he got me a job working with a sign painter and sign builder named Mr. John Wilson and I loved it. Working with Mr. Wilson was the first time I ever held a paint brush.

Art is not promoted as a career choice in inner city public schools, which is why, among other things, I left school in the 11th grade and hung out in libraries and bookstores in the art history sections trying to figure out what life and art were about. My life is all about art, it is how I see life, I guess that is because it is the only thing I have that I think I do well. And although we lived below the poverty line, I always felt like with art I was intelligent and could make some kind of future for myself if I could stick with it. And as an artist you know what I mean, you eat and sleep art.

I am sure that reading about art and artists also improved my reading skills, because you are not just reading on the surface, you have to know what those words and metaphors mean and in turn you learn about the world through art and artists and come to understand that the block you live on is not the whole world. In my opinion this is why art is not taught in public schools in the inner city, because it teaches you how to think and understand images and that is what the business class does not want you to do; become a critical thinker and an intellectual. They don’t’ want another Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, Augusta Savage. Because these visual artists and writers force you to see your self in the world, although you may disagree with what you see in the mirror they are holding up to you, you have to deal with it.

Yes, the art world is elitist and backward in its politics, because it is mostly managed by what Hans Haacke has called “Museums, Managers of Consciousness:” the 1 % class born into money who think that art is all about aesthetic pleasure, which is why war profiters see innocent people on death row or killed in war, as collateral damage.  And that drove Walter Annenberg and the blue bloods of the art world crazy: in their world art is used to disenfranchise people in the under class through promoting European art as the standard of what is human and intelligent and the rest of us as primitive and subhuman. My visual art became blatantly political after I heard and read the poetry of Sonia Sanchez; I think it was because her use of metaphors made me see what I could create with visual art, and the poetry was also a history lesson, that made me see myself in a new way.  After this I went right out and read more of her poetry and the writing of other poets and got into reading the literature and literary history of Black America and this opened up a new world to me.  I fell in love with literature and it inspired and added meaning to my artwork; before that I described my work as “just pretty colors,” I was painting mostly flowers, still life and art historical subject matter and was preoccupied with mostly formalist concerns.

The Charland study mirrors my experience, but some how I ignored the un-constructive things people would say to discourage my art and becoming an artist and kept going, because art was the only thing I had to hold onto and it kept me in museums, bookstores, libraries, and out of jail.

Theodore A. Harris, Postcard from Conquest, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: Can you talk some more about your early influences and mentors?  Did someone or something in particular teach you that a Black man could be an artist?

Theodore: Off the top of my head, it was that the more books I was exposed to with African American artists’ work in them and the more African American artists I met; that was how I knew I could pursue art.  Artists such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and always staring at those Blue Note [jazz] album covers reflected something back at me that was so powerful it even made me change the way I dressed; I started wearing suit jackets, dress shoes.  This in effect causes you to walk different and you take your self more seriously, you see yourself, community and world view differently and this shapes your art.  The more you know about the world the more you can teach yourself and your children to think globally.  That is why I refuse to be called a minority just because most of America claims the social construct of whiteness.  I am a citizen of the world and most of the world is made up of people of color, which makes them, the whites, the minority.

Theodore A. Harris, Assemblage for Decolonizing the Mind, for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I find this so important Theodore; it really underscores the significance of ethno-cultural influences, and how, even in the absence of direct mentorship, access to cultural history and art that we can relate to our own lived experiences can make all the difference in our lives.

I can see your concern with the global picture particularly in your anti-war pieces, and in the ways they raise questions about America’s place on the world stage.  Can you speak about the emotion and particularly the notion of violence for example, in the Collage and Conflict series?  I’m curious about whether you would describe art as a non-violent response to violence, and how you understand the use of art as a weapon.

Theodore: Yes, it is a non-violent response to violence in our homes and interpersonal relationships, but most of all it is a critique of America’s domestic and foreign policy, its self destructive militarism in the name of democracy. The Collage and Conflict series began as a compositional challenge to myself because I wanted to see what would happen. Working with the three panels all at once opened me up to experimenting with the surface, and I decided to attack it—to go to war on the surface by writing curses, setting it on fire, hitting it with a hammer, ripping it apart and putting it back together—and have figures in the piece attacking each other to raise the issue of ‘friendly fire.’  Bloody flesh wounds on the panels are meant to give the viewer a visceral feeling, as if they, their flesh, are being struck by a whip or a drone missile. And the blood that is spilled is a mirror in which I see the middle passage; our flesh in knots, fire-hosed with the slobber of biting dogs and pepper spray, under the orders of Sheriff “Bull” Connor, whose mouth is a little white tank moving backwards, camouflaged with Kara Walkers’ silhouettes.

I see art as an offensive and defensive weapon to defend your self and community, as it was in the great work Emory Douglas made for the Black Panthers’ news paper—I would say Emory is a Charles White turned up a few notches. Because of the influence of documentary film on my work, I would say the Collage and Conflict series are cinematic confrontational collages; cinematic because I see the juxtaposing and layering of images as creating a sense of movement as captured in film stills, and confrontational because of the weight of issues the work is dealing with. My work is about looking beneath the “Surface Politics” of aesthetics and formalism, to visualize a Black Aesthetic that is about “life over death” like Addison Gayle said.

Theodore A. Harris, Purple Hearts Bleed, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: I find collage to be somewhat of a ‘violent’ method in and of itself, in terms of the cutting, severing, disassociating and dislocating it involves.  I notice that you refer to it as ‘surgery’ and I find your work is similar to Wangechi Mutu’s, who has also described her collages as ‘delicate surgeries.’  Both of you also use wounds in your work in similar ways.  You describe war as a ‘map of wounds’ and have said that in your work the wounds might be from shrapnel, gunfire, friendly fire… I also think of those wounds in your and Mutu’s work as wounds of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. And the violence in yours and perversion in Mutu’s work, for me, have so much to do with the violent distortions and perversion of these systems, the ways they act on human bodies—flesh and blood—and on human-ness overall.  I’m also very intrigued by your identification of the Challenger explosion as a starting point.

Theodore: As an artist the goal of my work is to get the ideas in your head, so I would say Wangechi Mutu, John Heartfield, Romare Bearden, and I are attempting a kind brain surgery on the mind of the viewer, to do what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed “de-colonizing the mind.”  And yes those wounds are the result of damage done to our minds and bodies under capitalism, colonialism, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex—a plantation with stock options in sizzling electric chairs…I wonder if an innocent prisoner on his way to the electric chair, who has exhausted all his appeals to a crooked court, I wonder if he feels ‘Post-Black?’

In the two person exhibition “War is a Map of Wounds,” Howardena Pindell and I had at New Jersey City University, I had this quote by Amiri Baraka on the wall of the gallery above my work, for the most part to be directed at the art students: “It is a new world we want not an endowed chair in the concentration camp…art must be our magic weapon to create and re-create the world and our selves as part of it…This is my motto and the standard on which I make my work as magic weapons, created in the ‘Black Labs of the Heart.”

But another way to view that blood is to see it as the artist sacrifice in sweat and tears, Augusta Savages’ tears when she could not get back her sculpture “The Harp” she was commissioned to make for the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, that had been inspired by the song ”Lift Every Voice and Sing” and was destroyed after the Fair.

I was frozen when I witnessed the Challenger explosion, the images were so powerful that I started to collage them with images of crying babies, this is how I got into collage. Then I went on from there to collaging the U.$. Capitol building by turning it upside down, first done in my collage Vetoed Dreams of 1995.  Some people have asked me will I turn it right side up because President Obama is in office.  Why, because he is African American?[vi] I say no way; its too early for that, like I said before the scales of justice are not blind and even, and that is why now a world wide struggle is exploding.

Theodore A. Harris, Iced Leaders, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I think that may be a critical note that we might end on for now: that while our conversation for this paper has been largely driven by our common concerns and interests in relation to Black learners and communities, and Black artists and their art work, we both understand that the issues are not just “Black and White”—critical thinking, like your collages, is always more nuanced, layered and complex than that.

Theodore: From the outset it has been so great talking with you and we need you in the university and community to debunk how we see and what we think about ourselves in relation to the arts.

I almost took a Sculpture class once.  The first assignment which was to create an outdoor installation and my idea was to address the manner in which a person who lives on the street becomes perceived as being of the streets, like an organic part of the urban landscape.  I propped up a stuffed human form dressed in old clothing in a corner, almost camouflaged amid discarded materials and garbage bags.  Unfortunately, it was “not art” and I ended up leaving the class, but I did continue to think about the spatial relationships between people and the materials they use and discard.

A few years later, I watched a television documentary about people who live and work in a Mexico City garbage dump.  People who work in the dumps wading through the garbage and collecting and sorting recyclable materials to sell are referred to as the pepenadores, ‘the garbage people’.  Thousands not only work but live in the dumps, building their homes out of and on top of garbage.  In the documentary a woman showed a reporter how she had organized and decorated her small dwelling, built of cardboard and scraps of metals and plastics.  She was hospitable and welcomed the guest and cameras into her space.

All over the world, -from Mexico to Manila, Philippines to Itipini, South Africa to Olinda, Brazil; from Bangkok, Thailand to Port au Prince, Haiti, to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Managua, Nicaragua; and from Mumbai, India, to Cairo, Egypt to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, -people live and children are born in garbage dumps, living their lives as society’s discarded material.  The very definition of garbage, includes reference to people who are considered “totally worthless”.  The literal distinction then, between a discarded refrigerator and the person sleeping in it in a garbage dump does not exist.  Likewise, the distinction I had attempted to address in the sculpture class, between inanimate and living urban refuse.  Apparently, human worth, -the moral and social value of every person- is not a given.  Those who live in the assigned residential spaces are people; those who do not are somehow different.  As if the unstable spaces they occupy interact with their bodies, disrupting the boundary between what is interior and exterior, and creating such species as garbage-people.

I began to construct the Study for Berth Series as a response to what I had learned.  I found referring to the space on which the Study was being built as a garbage dump problematic and began calling it ‘the village’; not to deny the location, but to acknowledge a space where people live together as a community.  The documentary and subsequent research had left me pondering the human drive to organize and decorate the spaces in which we live, and the role this ordering plays in defining a space as “home”.  I had recently been told that a family member “did not have an address” and was living in his car in a major American city.  I wondered; is not having an address the same thing as being homeless?  What qualifies as a ‘home’?  And how does having a particular kind of ‘home’ protect us from melding with our environment?

I used many personal artefacts in the Study, parting with them and symbolically with various pasts each signified in my life (…a piece of the old such-and-such that so-and-so gave me or that I saved from such and such…). The idea of passing these things on to be recycled by the population of the village added a ritualistic and cathartic element to the project.  Reusing the items drained them of their former meanings and I found recycling material culture and giving new life to the fragments as a way of resituating my self in the world.  

Eventually the ‘village’ became too crowded, and The Berth Series was born, in a way an expansion from the dump into a shanty town or barrio.  I chose the word berth thinking about how each of us are born (birthed) into certain circumstances, with more or less space to manoeuvre and reposition ourselves.   We each are assigned a starting berth in the world, and this personal location largely determines the kinds of subjects we become and our possible future locations.

Throughout the series I struggled with a fear of romanticizing poverty, while wanting to capture the beauty of both the strange aesthetic of colourful debris and of the human interaction and daily living that was taking place within each space.   I was mindful of coveting an imagined non-industrial, non-materialistic, indigenous culture.    Working with the individual berths quite different than the village; it felt as though there had been a growth and fragmentation, and that the berths represented a new form of alienation and containment.  Compartmentalizing impoverished people in the margins of society enables us to control how much of them and the reality of their circumstances that we see and likewise, most of the berths have lids that can close and safely suppress, if not conceal the contents.  Viewers have to get close to the berth, repositioning either themselves or the berths in order to truly gaze at the colourful people going about their lives inside.

Sieglinde Lemke has argued that a diaspora aesthetic (referring to the African Diaspora) is concerned with the dialectic of the ‘home’ and the ‘host land’, and often reflects a nostalgic yearning for diasporic roots[i].  This frame can be applied to the Berth Series in that the work reflects such nostalgia and concern with ‘home’ and homelessness, but the success of the work remains questionable.   Several viewers have commented that they would like to live in a particular berth, suggesting that I captured something desirable in the berths, -perhaps a sense of communalism,-but not the stark, toxic reality of living amid garbage.  The one time the Series was exhibited feedback included one viewer who wished she had the outfit one of the figures in a berth was wearing, and another that felt it was a shame that the berths were ‘such dreary colours’.  In the way these comments suggest, I have found that especially treated individually, the berths are too easy to treat like decorative little underdeveloped doll houses.  They need the strength of their numbers to make a statement, so the twenty-four berths should have been attached together.  To exhibit them again I would use no less than one hundred, precariously stacked and attached to one another on a mound of rotting garbage.

I have found traces of the ideas behind both my attempted outdoor installation and The Berth Series realized with great success in the work of Nigerian artist Dilomprizulike, “The Junkman from Africa”, and therefore conclude this reflection with a brief discussion of his work.  Dilomprizulike builds assemblage people out of ‘junk’ and old clothing that he finds in his environment.  He lives with his family on an isolated compound in Lagos called the Junkyard, where he runs the Junkyard Museum of Awkward Things and now offers studio spaces, artist in residency and international exchange programs.  For Dilomprizulike “The junkyard is a heap of things that we call junk, but really, a heap of materials that tell stories, just like Lagos is a heap of human beings, cars and stuff that tell stories as well.”[ii]

Dilomprizulike was born Dil Humphrey-Umezulike.  He explains that his name Dilomprizulike is an icon, and that an icon “is defined as the significance or the meaning of a thing.”[iii]  His comment recalls the weight attached to naming in African cultural traditions, and in naming himself the “Junkman from Africa” he assigns himself the role of junk-keeper, while at the same time flirts with the identity of junk-man, like the pepenadores in the Mexican dump.    He refers to his name as the meaning of a thing rather than of a person, thus blurring the boundary between himself and his junk.  For Dilomprizulike, the meaning of his life lies in his role as Junkman; not just any Junkman, but The Junkman from Africa.  At a 2005 exhibition Dilomprizulike commented that contents of the rucksack worn by one of his figures are “pointers to what is happening in his life”.  When asked “who is he?” the Junkman answered “He is one of us.”[iv]

Dilomprizulike’s assemblage installations refer to what he describes as “the alienated situation of the African in his own society” and remind us that African dislocation and fragmentation exists within the continent as well as without.  The artist explains: “The alienated situation of the African in his own society becomes tragic. There is a struggle inside him, a consciousness of living with the complications of an imposed civilisation. He can no longer go back to pick up the fragments of his father’s shattered culture; neither is he equipped enough to keep pace with the white-man’s world.”[v]  As has been noted elsewhere, Dilomprizulike’s description of the struggle to achieve balance “between the Nigerian city-man and his bruised knowledge of his authentic roots”[vi] echoes Frantz Fanon’s analysis of black alienation resulting from colonialism and the legacy of the colonial encounter.[vii]

Dilomprizulike’s figures appear to be of the environment in which they are installed and also appear to be of one another.  As artist Uchechukwu James-Iroha has put it in reference to Dilomprizulike’s 2003 “Waiting for the Bus” (shown), the work seems to be one piece “broken into individual, but very organized bits”.[viii] The achievement of this sense of oneness creates the sense that the figures exist and move communally, in this case waiting together for the bus “to the promised land, in the form of economic prosperity, development and better lives.”[ix] 

And perhaps to ward against any nostalgic Western pining (diasporic or otherwise), on being asked if he feels an association with the figures waiting for the bus, Dilomprizulike’s response is that “The work – as pieces, individuals or as a whole – are living their own lives, we are watching them. There are no sentiments about them.”

[ii] Dilomprizulike quoted in Wood, Molara (2005) “Dilomprizulike: Wear and Tear”, The Gaurdian, Nigeria Retrieved 31-07-2009 from: http://www.odili.net/news/source/2005/apr/17/1.html

[iii] Dilomprizulike, quoted in “Dilomprizulike: The ‘Junkman From Africa’ (Nigeria)”, in Spring, Chris (2008) ANGAZA AFRICA: African Art Now.  Exh. Cat. Laurence King Publishing Ltd., London. p. 92.

[iv] Wood, Molara (2005)

[v] Dilomprizulike (2002) Africas: The artist and the City: A journey and exhibtion”, quoted in “Biographical data: Dil Humphrey-Umezulike”, African Success: People changing the face of Africa.  Retrieved 31-07-2009 from: http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=165&lang=en

[vi] Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005), Teachers’ package.  Hayward Gallery, South Bank Center, London. Retrieved 31.07.2009 from: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/minisites/africaremix/source/AfricaRemix.pdf

[vii] “Biographical data: Dil Humphrey-Umezulike”

[viii] Quoted in Wood (2005)

[ix] ibid

 All works below by rosalind hampton except Image 5 and 12.  These works are by by Dilomprizulike.