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at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 19 April 2016, as part of the Artists at the Institute Series
It is important that I give you a brief introduction to my background, because it is our bacground, which provides the underpinning to our sensibility, a crucial element in making art.
I am a product of American apartheid. My life has been shaped and continues to be shaped by the politics of race in America. White people controlled every aspect of life in my hometown of Bessemer, Alabama. Public schools were segregated. Public transportation was segregated. Neighborhoods were segregated; even the jails and cemeteries were segregated. I never had a class with a White teacher or sat in a classroom with White students, until I arrived in New York to study at the Cooper Union Art School in i960. I remember the public buses with their painted wood signs in bold graphic letters, which said white on one side and colored on the other. Only the White bus driver and White passengers had the legal right to move the sign.
My father was a coal miner; my mother a seamstress who later opened the Annie B. Whitten Kindergarten. Bessemer, along with Birmingham, was the center of the steel-making industry. Steel companies came to Alabama, because of the natural availability of coal, limestone, and iron ore, the major ingredients in steel. Raw materials and cheap labor were the enticements for the coal and steel companies. The end of the Civil War marked the end of slavery, but its survival continued in the corrupt penal system. Alabama, in particular, benefited from a vast labor pool of poor, recendy emancipated African Americans. Douglas A. Blackmons 2008 book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, is a chilling history lesson; it is a horror story of involuntary Black servitude.
Growing up in Bessemer, I never had the legal right to visit the public library or any museums, but more than once, we were taken on school field trips to steel mills in Birmingham. The steel mills fascinated me, and I grew up hearing stories about them from my uncles who worked there. The unbelievable heat and fiery-golden...