***’s Neighborhood

the folks at asheville citizen-times newspaper asked me a few art questions in their weekly artist profile.  take a look.

the entries have been a bit sparse as of late.  lots going on -- the asheboro paintings are just about finished.  there will be a packed gallery come next april.  started working on new paintings of women floating.  more about that later.  i hope to incorporate inspirations from time here in asheboro into these works.  also working on a portait commission.  still searching for chupacabra. . .  

My residency at Elsewhere ended since my last post and there is much to say about my time spent there. While I had intended to be better about updating this blog, time passes quickly when you live inside a city inside a world inside a thrift store. Perhaps more updates later, but for now a brief passage from the essay that I was working on, intermittently, in fits and starts, while in Greensboro.

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North Carolina is a state with many stories to tell. American political scientist, Vladimir Orlando Key once described North Carolina as “a bridge between the Deep South and the nation as a whole.” A bridge provides passage between two distinct places, serving to both separate and connect them. It is an intermediary, a gray zone, a site of potential and negotiation. North Carolina has been characterized as “a beacon of Southern progressivism,” and yet, remains deeply entrenched in a complex racialized history—one of the last states to secede from the Union, yet a Confederate state nonetheless. The city of Greensboro is, in many ways, a microcosm that exemplifies North Carolina’s negotiated stance within American history. Greensboro’s relationship to the Civil Rights Movement illuminates these contradictions. In 1954 Greensboro became the first city in the South to adhere to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, however it wasn’t until 1971 that Greensboro officially desegregated its public schools, making Greensboro one of the last cities to comply with the federal desegregation standards. Yet during this seventeen year standstill Greensboro became known as the birthplace of the Civil Rights sit-in movement when on February 1, 1960 four African-American students from North Carolina’s A&T University refused to leave the whites-only lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth’s department store. This event ignited a series of sit-ins throughout the country and was, in many ways, the precursor to the Freedom Riders of 1961, student activists who traveled by interstate buses into the Deep South to test the recent outlawing of segregation in restaurants and bus terminals. Greensboro’s own student activism continued well into the 1970s when the city became known as the Southeast center for the Black Power movement. During this time community organizations were formed such as the Foundation for Community Development and Greensboro Association of Poor People, organizations considered less extreme than the Black Liberation Front or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and yet, held at their core the fight for racial justice. Antithetical to the work of these organizations there was and remains a strong presence of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party in the area.   

These paradoxes are both specific to North Carolina and yet, reverberate throughout the country. There is a desire to contain these historical contradictions and complex race relations to the geographically bounded space of the American South. I was reminded of this recently during a conversation with an older mentor of mine, an activist in San Francisco and a participant in the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation Front in New York City during the early 1970s. After telling her about my plans to travel to Greensboro, s he quickly remarked, “North Carolina? I refuse to go further south than Pennsylvania.” Even after sharing my knowledge of the culture of activism and radical politics thriving in Greensboro, she remained skeptical and even defiant. Despite her own involvement in grassroots organizing, nothing would convince her that there was more to the South than the history of racism and conservative politics.  

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My relationship to the South came first through geography lessons and history textbooks. Born and raised in Northern California, it wasn’t until I volunteered in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans during the summer of 2006 that I spent a sustained amount of time in the South. While this experience was certainly unique, it provided me with an opportunity to learn first hand about the nuances and complexities of the South. The mythology surrounding the South is thick. There is great danger in viewing the American South through a singular lens of its racist past and present and much to be gained in challenging these mythologies and stereotypes. If we are to see the South as a mirror, as Howard Zinn suggests in his 1971 publication, The Southern Mystique, then the history embedded within this landscape becomes indicative of currents traveling throughout the country, spanning historical and geographical space and time. In doing so, those within and beyond the South are implicated and asked to take account of our own position within a history that is as much American as it is Southern. It is no wonder that there are so many emotional charges and refusals to examine a site of undeniable injustice, suffering and disenfranchisement particularly when we acknowledge its mirrored reflection throughout the country. Yet, as Greensboro informs us, there is a rich history of strong social movements and resistance against that which gives the South its reputation. There is power in this history and in understanding the lineages you are participating within. There is even more power in activating this history beyond its site-specificity and temporality.