Tribal Designs, RBG

"Tribal Designs, RBG", 15 x 22, ink, 2007.

In the spring of 2007, I was a junior in high school and the only Black male in a nearly all-white class, where I was harrassed day after day for not contributing to the classroom culture they had created. It would've been best for me to just get myself out of a hostile environment such as this, but at the time I didn't know anything about following my own desire and was easily influenced by others. I was often told by teachers and classmates that the best way to change these types of situations for the better was to not say anything when being verbally assaulted and ride it out with my dignity - whatever was left of it, anyway.

So being the only Black male in the class and the only Black person who had any pride in their Blackness (the only other Black people besides me in the class were two girls who were content with the class culture established by their white peers) led me to want to depict Black people and our culture in my work. Printmaking was the classroom assignment for the semester and I already had came up with a set of organic designs for my first piece and I had started looking through the classroom pile of old magazines for African art that I could use for my next design. However, not a single piece of African art was featured in any of the magazines, whch upset me.

Then one day while looking in a trade magazine from the pile, I came across a square with what looked like African designs. I read the description to see if they were actually African, but to my dismay once again, they weren't and it said that they were Native American. I went ahead and used the designs for my next printmaking piece since they were the closest to looking African that I could find and they did appeal to me a little since I happened to also have Native American in my family.