Collins Unbound

During the month of February, in celebration of Black History Month, Collins Library will be featuring posts on some of the men celebrated in the traveling exhibition “Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth.” currently on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Men of Change opened December 21, 2019 and will close March 15, 2020. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service developed the exhibit and maintains a website with additional information on the highlighted men.

The Men of Change are arranged by seven themes: Storytellers, Myth-Breakers, Fathering, Community, Imagining, Catalysts, and Loving. Artists were invited to interpret each of the men in portraits that are as diverse as the African-Americans they represent.

COMMUNITY
Represent.

Dr. Rob Gore
The streets, blocks, schools, churches, mosques, and neighborhoods that shaped these MEN OF CHANGE helped write their life stories. Their ancestors formed communities to survive, and, centuries later, this collective strength is one of the many reasons these men found a way to thrive. By building community and brotherhood, they continue a tradition that is a hallmark of black culture. And because it is crucial to honor the impact of these neighborhoods and support networks, it’s important to remember that these men maintained an unbroken connection to the places that formed them and the people who raised them. This makes their success a shared experience. For a true MAN OF CHANGE represents more than himself—he represents us all.

Dr. Rob Gore was born in 1977 and grew up in Brooklyn, NY, the son of a community activist and a teacher. He attended Morehouse College, a historically Black college, and received his medical degree from University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He is currently an emergency physician at King’s County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York.

After becoming a physician in his native Brooklyn, Dr. Rob Gore saw that a healing was needed—one that went beyond the practicalities of medicine and tapped into the power of community.

Believing that violence is an endemic public health problem, in 2008 Gore founded the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI). The nonprofit offers alternatives to the number of at-risk youths who Gore found himself treating in the ER after they’d become victims of the violence that pervaded their neighborhoods. According figures cited by the Ted Residency program in 2016, the No. 1 cause of death among African-American men 15 to 34 is homicide. Through KAVI, Gore offers group mentoring, teacher training, therapeutic response to victims, leadership camps, conflict de-escalation training, and more. The trauma that has been inflicted upon his community has inspired Dr. Rob Gore to empower a generation of young adults to take hold of their potential and heal their world. KAVI’s mission is grounded in the belief that “young people are our greatest hope for a more just and peaceful world. When we partner with our communities to invest in our youth, we understand their challenges and can work to change the course of historical inequities, tackling critical social issues such as different forms of violence. Only when ALL youth are treated with compassion and given opportunities to thrive, can we ensure that all communities are vibrant and successful.”

Dr. Gore was an inaugural Ted Resident in 2016. The TED Residency program is an incubator for breakthrough ideas. It is free and open to all via a semi-annual competitive application. Those chosen as TED Residents spend four months at TED headquarters in New York City, working on their idea. Selection criteria include the strength of their idea, their character, and their ability to bring a fresh perspective and positive contribution to the diverse TED community. In 2018, he was named a CNN Hero.

Portrait Artist:  Tariku Shiferaw
Tariku Shiferaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Los Angeles, CA, and presently lives and works in New York City. Through his ongoing body of work titled, “One of These Black Boys,” Shiferaw explores mark-making in order to address the physical and metaphysical spaces of painting and societal structures. He is a current participant of Open Sessions at The Drawing Center and an artist in residence at the LES Studio Program.

Bio from artist website

During the month of February, in celebration of Black History Month, Collins Library will be featuring posts on some of the men celebrated in the traveling exhibition “Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth.” currently on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Men of Change opened December 21, 2019 and will close March 15, 2020. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service developed the exhibit and maintains a website with additional information on the highlighted men.

The Men of Change are arranged by seven themes: Storytellers, Myth-Breakers, Fathering, Community, Imagining, Catalysts, and Loving. Artists were invited to interpret each of the men in portraits that are as diverse as the African-Americans they represent.

Imagining: Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was born on March 17, 1912 into the family of Julia (Davis) and Janifer Rustin, his maternal grandparents who were wealthy caterers in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His grandmother was a Quaker and a member of the NAACP; and their home was frequented by NAACP leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.

As a young man, he was involved in the founding of CORE, the Congress for Racial Equality, and studied and incorporated nonviolent tactics in his protest of Jim Crow laws. In 1947, Rustin and George Houser, one of the founders of CORE, organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first of the Freedom Rides, that tested the Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation on interstate transportation was unconstitutional. As a result of his actions, Rustin was arrested in North Carolina and served twenty-two days on a chain gang. In 1953, Rustin was arrested in California for having sex with two men in a parked car. He pled guilty to a charge of sex perversion (sodomy) and served sixty days in jail. In January 2020, California State Senator Scott Wiener, chair of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus, and Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus, called for Governor Gavin Newsom to issue a posthumous pardon for Rustin’s arrest for having sex with men, citing Rustin’s legacy as a civil rights icon. Newsom issued the pardon on February 5 while also announcing a new process for fast-tracking pardons for those convicted under historical laws that made homosexuality illegal.

As one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rustin worked with Martin Luther King Jr. to bring about the boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses in 1956 and introduced King to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, something that had been absent from King’s arsenal prior to their partnership. Rustin’s crowning achievement as an activist was organizing the People’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. King was forever memorialized for his “I Have a Dream” speech. However, because of his past membership in the Communist Party and his homosexuality, NAACP Chairman Roy Wilkins insisted that Rustin not receive any public credit for his work. Over time, Rustin’s name faded from the storied ranks of civil rights movement icons.

Bayard Rustin died on August 24, 1987 of a perforated appendix. Six years later, on August 8, 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award in the United States, on the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington. The citation in the press release stated:

Bayard Rustin was an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all. An advisor to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance, participated in one of the first Freedom Rides, organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.

Portrait Artist:  Sissòn
Sissòn  (b. 1986) is a non-binary, self-taught American artist. Their work reveals and questions the experiences and social constructs of race, identity, and power. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Glendale, Arizona, Sissòn began their creative curriculum at age seven under the tutelage of their mother, Kimberlin. When she passed away in 2006, Sissòn abandoned their practice for almost a decade. They returned in 2015, creating work that would form the basis of their first solo show, Ivory, Gold, Slaves. Sissòn continues to eschew the gallery system, showing independently in New York and Los Angeles where they live and work.

Artist bio and photograph from Smithsonian site.

Exhibit photographs by Angela Weaver, 2020.

During the month of February, in celebration of Black History Month, Collins Library will be featuring posts on some of the men celebrated in the traveling exhibition “Men of Change:  Power. Triumph. Truth.” currently on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Men of Change opened December 21, 2019 and will close March 15, 2020. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service developed the exhibit and maintains a website with additional information on the highlighted men.

The Men of Change are arranged by seven themes:  Storytellers, Myth-Breakers, Fathering, Community, Imagining, Catalysts, and Loving. Artists were invited to interpret each of the men in portraits that are as diverse as the African-Americans they represent.

Myth-Breakers:  Kendrick Lamar
African-American musician Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 LP Damn became the first Hip-Hop album to win the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Music, recognized by the awards organization as being “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” Hailing from Compton, CA, Lamar rose to mainstream prominence with his second studio album, To Pimp a Butterfly, which won the Grammy for Best Rap Album in 2016. Damn, in addition to the Pulitzer Prize, also won a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. In total, The Recording Academy has awarded Kendrick Lamar thirteen gilded gramophones. His explosive performance at the 58^th Grammy Awards became one of the cultural touchstones of 2016. Lamar was also responsible for curating the soundtrack for the 2018 Marvel film, Black Panther, directed by another of the exhibition’s Myth-Breakers, Ryan Coogler.

Kendrick Lamar albums

• Section.80 (2011)
• Good Kid, M.A.A.D City (2012)
• To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
• Damn (2017)
• Black Panther Soundtrack (2018)

Portrait Artist:  Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams is a Baltimore-born, Brooklyn, New York-based artist whose critically admired work spans painting, collage, sculpture, performance, video, and sound installations. His multidisciplinary practice engages the ways in which individuals’ ideals, aspirations, and personae become attached to specific objects, colors, textures, symbols, and ideologies. His work probes the influence of popular culture on the formation of self-image, and the relationship between man and monument as they coexist and embody one another. Adams is also deeply immersed in questions of how African American experiences intersect with art history, American iconography, and consumerism.

*Burton, Justin Adams. “ “Cheap and Easy Radicalism”  The Legible Politics of Kendrick Lamar,” Posthuman Rap. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2017. Web. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190235451.001.0001/oso-9780190235451-chapter-3

*Exhibit photographs by Angela Weaver, 2020.

During the month of February, in celebration of Black History Month, Collins Library will be featuring posts on some of the men celebrated in the traveling exhibition “Men of Change:  Power. Triumph. Truth.” currently on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Men of Change opened December 21, 2019 and will close March 15, 2020. The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service developed the exhibit and maintains a website with additional information on the highlighted men.

The Men of Change are arranged by seven themes:  Storytellers, Myth-Breakers, Fathering, Community, Imagining, Catalysts, and Loving. Artists were invited to interpret each of the men in portraits that are as diverse as the African-Americans they represent.

Storyteller:  August Wilson
August Wilson was born April 27, 1945 in Pittsburgh, PA and died October 2, 2005 in Seattle, WA. A celebrated playwright, he dramatized the African American experience via his ten-play cycle. Each of the works in the cycle take place in a different decade; the earliest, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is set in 1911 and the most recent, Radio Golf, the year is 1997. His plays have been both critical and box office successes, garnering Tony Awards and Drama Desk Awards. Fences and The Piano Lesson were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Drama; and Wilson is the only playwright to have won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play seven times. On October 2005, shortly after Wilson’s death, the Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre, becoming the only Broadway theater to bear the name of an African American.

August Wilson Plays
Plays not owned by Collins Library can be borrowed from libraries in Summit.

• Jitney, 1982
• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts, 1984   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 M3 1985
• Fences, 1985   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 F4 1986
• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: A Play in Two Acts, 1986   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 J64 1988
• The Piano Lesson, 1987   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 P54 1990
• Two Trains Running, 1990   Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 T96 1992
• Seven Guitars, 1995  Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 S48 1997
• King Hedley II, 2000
• Gem of the Ocean, 2003  Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 G46 2006
• How I Learned What I Learned, 2003
• Radio Golf, 2005  Collins Library   Print Books   PS3573.I45677 R33 2007

Portrait Artist:  Radcliffe Bailey

Radcliffe Bailey is a painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist who utilizes the layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text to explore themes of ancestry, race, and memory. Bailey believes that by translating his personal experiences, he can achieve an understanding of, and a healing from, a universal history. His work is often created out of found materials and certain pieces from his past, including traditional African sculpture, tintypes of his family members, piano keys, and Georgia red clay.

Bio from the Jack Shainman Gallery; image from the New Gallery of Modern Art

Exhibit photographs by Angela Weaver, 2020.