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!