Excercising my Mynd with BK "I Am Art" Adams

Last Friday was a terrific day and thus far, this has been an amazing semester. I have grown and been so inspired. My artistic fire has been rekindled and I look forward to being able to take advantage of free time (whenever and where ever I can find it.)

Ever since I moved to Washington two years ago I have been haunted by stickers and posters all over the neighborhoods I frequent and where I currently reside. Black and white stickers with a bearded man with the words "I AM ART" emblazoned along the bottom. If you've spent anytime at a bus stop, a stop sign, on the metro, on U Street, in Eastern Market, or Chinatown you've seen BK. You may have been like me and not known who he was or what the stickers symbolized but whether you like it or not, BK Adams IS art.

Last Friday, I took a friend who is enrolled as an Exhibition Design masters student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design with me to Anacostia to see the "Excercise your Mynd" exhibit. I had only heard a few details about the show but figured it was something worth looking into. Whether a 12 foot canvas to honor his kindred spirit, renowned artist, Sam Gilliam, coffee cups, fully functional bicycles the exhibition was a feast for the eyes, mind and soul.  I was all at once enveloped in beauty and magic and mystery and color. Some pieces were reminiscent of Basquiat, others like "Throwing Biscuits" reminded me of Jackson Pollock.

From flipping through the program I recognized the director of the museum in the gallery and immediately introduced myself. I gushed about how taken I was by the exhibit and she informed me that the artist had run home to grab something but that he would be coming back soon if I would like to met him. I did and he was as warm and inviting as inviting could be. I interviewed him informally and he answered each one of my questions without hesitation. He couldn't have been any nicer or more gracious. More exhaustive in his fascinating breakdowns of his work, his thought process, his creative process and "the seasons" that inspired each and every piece he creates.

As a third generation artist, he sees fun as his primary concern.He is fascinated by flight and plans on taking monthly hang gliding trips with fellow artists and kindred spirits in the coming weeks to experience true freedom. The number 3 is present in nearly all his work symbolizing the three generations of artists in his family, also resembling his initials when viewed in reverse, 3 legs on the easels he sometimes works on and also his visual concept of balance and perfection.

When asked about his "I AM ART" he replied simply that we are ALL art. Art is expression, beauty, majesty and truth. Art is in every fiber of our being, from the way we turn our heads to the way we speak. There is beauty everywhere we look and the more we free ourselves from negative thinking and push positivity the happier we will be.

This is a link to a fabulous article on the artist as it appeared in Worn Magazine late last year: Throwing Biscuits with BK Adams : Worn Magazine : Fashion, Art, and Style in Washington, DC http://shar.es/HPNn2

Asian American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery

It is easy to be blissfully ignorant believing that everyone and everything around you can be put into neat little boxes; Black, White, Asian, Latino, Gay and Straight. But people don't work that way. Things don't work that way. We all have a story to tell that is ours and ours alone. It has been quite some time since I have been pulled in quite like I was pulled in last week. Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits now view at the National Portrait Gallery touched me.

Gazing down the corridor to see CYJO's individual photographic portraits of Korean Americans I was reminded of Mexican casta paintings used by Spanish colonizers to justify treating mixed race people and their children either as worthy or unworthy of respect based on their particular hybrid.

Casta paintings created and simultaneously reinforced notions of racial superiority, systematically denying them their humanity on the basis of particular 'genetic cocktails'. So in effect, by presenting numerous Korean Americans one by one along with their own individual stories as they relate to their journey toward self-discovery and self-actualization, CYJO allows her audience to see Korean Americans as they are, not as one monolithic people with one face, but rather like all other ethnic groups, deserving of being seen as individuals who are part of a greater community. A community of individuals who are keepers of their own stories and experiences.

Daniel Dae Kim

Maggie Kim

I will include the wall text that accompanied Maggie Kim's portrait that I found so touching.
"My Korean American experience: Eat Kimchi. Take shoes off at an American classmate’s house and get funny looks. Be a faux-punk high school rebel. Learn to pine after blue-eyed, white boys. Aspire to be Madonna. Not allowed to just “hang out” at the mall. Be the smartest kid in school. Never have a boyfriend. Go to an Ivy League university. . . . The Big Apple calls. Yellow fever does exist! Learn Korean again and for real. . . . Forgive parents for everything they didn’t know about being American. Thank parents for everything they knew about being Korean."

As an African American woman with natural hair from the South, without any children or husband who is in pursuit of graduate studies I have been seen in a lens I don't care for: as an anomaly. When in fact, all of the other young women I surround myself with share my common experience. My friends and I all grew up hearing how "different" we were from the rest of "them." Although I resented it at first and wanted to fit in I came to appreciate that I never became one of "them." Whoever "they" were. So in that sense, I feel a since of kinship with other artists such as CYJO and  Roger Shimomura who create portraits and self portraits to deconstruct stereotypes and speak from a voice and place of  authentic experience.

Shimomura Crossing the Delaware

I was thrilled to surrender my subconscious misconceptions and assumptions at the door in favor of a more progressive view of our roles as individuals to not necessarily always represent our entire RACE, but instead be more comfortable in our own skin, speaking and acting for ourselves. There is no monolithic narrative that informs the Asian and Pacific American experience in these United States any more than there is one for the 'quintessential American' or the Everyday Black voice or movement or sense of expression. But the narrative that ran through all of Asian American Portraiture Now was poignant and informative.

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

My favorite line from American Cinema is one of the most simple, and yet it speaks volumes. Where should one start? The answer always is, for lack of other options, at the beginning. Or as Maria sings in an upbeat cheerful melody, "Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start."

This blog is a significant beginning for me. An artistic,cultural and personal rebirth. For the last two years since I moved to Washington to pursue an internship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I have served as an intern at the Smithonsian American Art Museum and worked in retail.While at SAAM I learned a great many things about Public Relations and Education. I was able to keep my hand on the pulse of events in our museum and in the many communities that make D.C. the phenomenal city it is.

While serving in the Education department at SAAM I was able to do research that was going to be compiled in the Oh Freedom! project to tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement through the art and objects of SAAM and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Although I grew up with parents and grandparents who were active during the Movement and had close relationships with the likes of Jesse Jackson, Dr. Martin Luther King and Ralph David Abernathy among others, I learned so much more that I could have ever expected.

In the intermittent period, I worked full time in retail for Victoria's Secret. Although it is no academic paradise, I learned valuable lessons about work ethic and dedication. I was thrilled to be promoted and thrilled to be able to continue to lead my team.

I am now equally estatic to now be in graduate school pursuing my passion for art, history and culture an intern for an art curator at a burgeoning new museum. The museum is National Museum of African American History and Culture and it marries all of my interests: art, history and culture. I am doing research on a little known but prolific Abstract Expressionist, Herbert Gentry. The freedom with which Mr. Gentry lived his life artistically and socially was seemingly unheard of in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. So instead of allowing himself to be relegated to treatment as a second class citizen he lived in Stockholm and Paris where his talent could open doors that his hue would have barred him from in his homeland.

In doing reserch on Gentry I have come to discover many other artists who lived similarly, far more than I had expected. I am neither shocked nor dismayed.I am thrilled to read of artistic and humanistic triumph. It gives me strength, it inspires me and calls me to remain steadfast, hold true to my convictions and attack my future with relentless and reckless wild abandon. If this is my beginning, LOOK OUT THERE WORLD!