Welcome to Hillman.

You've Seen the Paintings. Now here are their stories.

A Harlem Story

I was born in Harlem Hospital, beneath WPA murals Black artists painted for working people. Harlem handed me a paintbrush first.

This painting is my childhood memoir. The girl in pigtails is me, a window observer. Here the windows watch back: in one I’m haloed in gold, in another heading home. Ladders climb the buildings, because a ladder meant a way out.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Harlem felt like Africa. Pan-African pride and Black Power filled the streets in dashikis and kente, Malcolm X spoke on corners, and “Black is Beautiful” lived on every block. Larry Neal called the Black Arts Movement Black Power’s aesthetic and spiritual sister; it gave that pride sound and form. The masks, crowns, beadwork, and Adinkra symbols here aren’t decoration. They are how Harlem saw itself: regal, ancestral, connected to the continent.

But I won’t paint nostalgia without truth. The city practiced “benign neglect,” and then heroin epidemic came. After school I climbed home past drug addicts on the stairwell steps. Needles covered the ground where I played, so many they made patterns, and I saw patterns, not needles. Here they lie on my stairs and hopscotch squares, exactly where they were.

At the painting’s heart, I’m a little girl in my father’s arms, his eyes closed, a cross on his chest. I never met my father. That absence was also policy: until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1968, welfare’s “man-in-the-house” rule could cut off single mothers if a man lived in the home or even visited. A generation grew up with fathers kept outside the door. In my painting, I let him in.

A Harlem Story holds childhood, neighborhood, love, danger, survival, and memory on one canvas. It refuses to choose between beauty and pain. It remembers Harlem whole.

Home to Me

There are no people in this painting, but look again: they are everywhere.

Home to Me is the Harlem I remember, told through the evidence people left behind. Tenements lean toward one another like neighbors bending in to talk. Across rooftops and fire escapes run clotheslines heavy with white sheets pinned in orange, flags of belonging that say: someone lives here, made a home in a city that offered us little room.

A clothesline here was never just for laundry. Neighbors tossed weighted rope across alleys, and every line stretching from one window to another became lines of community, connecting us to each other. Women pinning the wash shared news across the airshaft while watching children below. Notes, favors, even a cup of sugar glided between windows. Before every home had a telephone, Harlem talked by rope and clothespin.

When landlords let buildings crumble, Harlem answered with rent strikes and rent parties: fried fish, music, a little at the door, and the block came through. When the system failed us, we built our own.

This is what home and community meant to me: not a single apartment, but a web of lines between windows, holding a community together.

Sweet Reckoning

A reckoning began as arithmetic, the counting of what is owed. It came to mean the moment the past catches up with the present, and a person, a family, or a nation must answer for what it has done or endured.

In Sweet Reckoning, a woman stands inside that moment. With her eyes closed, she listens inward. Her hand rises in testimony,

and talent, praise, protection, and a declaration: “Enough.” Blue waves surge, and an orange halo blesses her like a sunrise. Magic comes from her hand. Whatever was held against her is being released. Her heart and soul full of art and creativity.

For centuries, Western art placed Black women in the picture but never behind the easel. We appeared as servants, caricatures, or anonymous bodies at the edge of someone else’s story. Museums called white male work “universal” and ours “craft.” Here she is the center, crowned in her own hair, deciding how she is seen.

The sweetness is that this reckoning arrives not as revenge but as beauty: a Black woman painting herself back into the archive that erased her.

Mine was earned in the hours between. For over 30 years I taught full-time and painted at night and on weekends. Every canvas made in those hours is a debt the art world is only beginning to repay.

Nina Simone said an artist’s duty is “to reflect the times,” and that you can’t help it. Neither can I. A reckoning becomes sweet when the account is not only settled, but rewritten.

Soul Frequency

You cannot see a frequency. You can only feel what it does to you.

Soul Frequency paints the invisible: vibration, rhythm, ancestry, the current that moves between people and across generations. On a field of deep blue, marks circle, collide, and return to a central pulse. Rings ripple outward like sound through a room, like a heartbeat through a body. This painting does not depict sound. It paints what sound leaves behind in us.

Look at the lines. Many are broken into links, like chains. But these chains do not bind. They carry current.

The African American soul runs on a shared frequency, built from ancestral memory and an unbroken line of creative resistance. One signal is sent, and the collective body answers in the ring shout, the jazz ensemble, the cadence of Black speech, the crowded dance floor. No one rehearses it. We are already tuned to the same wavelength.

They tried to cut the signal. After the Stono Rebellion in 1740, South Carolina outlawed drums among the enslaved, because drums carried messages. So the current moved inward, into the stomp of a foot, the clap of a hand, the bent notes of the blues. Rhythm became a technology of our survival.

Every mark here is a pulse. Every ring is an echo of the one before it.

When I paint, I am not working alone. I am drawing from a deep, shared well, sending a signal to my people to feel before you it can be explained.

Above the Veil

On May 25, 2020, the world watched George Floyd lose his breath under a police officer’s knee. He called out that he could not breathe. Then he was gone.

I felt helpless. So I went into my studio, joined the choir, and painted Above the Veil.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described “the Veil,” the barrier of race separating Black Americans from the rest of the world. He also wrote of a place beyond its reach: “So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.” The knee on George Floyd’s neck was the Veil enforced with violence. It took the one thing every song needs. It took his breath.

So I painted breath.

Row upon row, singers rise toward the sky, eyes closed, faces lifted. Each crown of hair circles like a halo, a sound wave, a portal. In front, three raise their hands in praise, surrender, or calling something down. Their bare feet stand on clouds, beyond the Veil’s reach.

When Black people sing, our separate voices become one sound, and can turn grief into resilience, joy, call and response and something the whole room can carry. Born in the spirituals our ancestors sang to survive music is a sanctuary no one can lock us out of. We meet in the frequency of music and song.

This painting is my place in that choir of Black people singing. My voice is the brush. Every figure is singing the breath back into the world. Even in a modern crucifixion, our voices rose. We sang and will continue to sing ourselves above the Veil.

Divine

She sees you before you see her.

Divine stands life-sized, wrapped in a hooded cloak against a dark field. A halo of gold, pink, and silver bursts behind her like light breaking through stone. Her face is deep blue-black, her lips crimson, her eyes steady and unblinking. Everything else is covered. You cannot read her body or her story. All you have is her gaze, and it is already on you.

Divine means coming directly from God. Her cloak, one of the oldest forms of shelter, was made to guard travelers from weather and from the eyes of strangers. Built stroke by stroke like a mosaic, it shimmers in blues and violets like night water. Look closer and you will find patches. For generations, patches marked poverty: people who mended, made do, and kept going. I stitched them on her on purpose. The holy and the poor wear the same garment. The woman the world overlooked is the one crowned in light.

Western portraiture taught Black and marginalized subjects to look down or away, so the viewer could look in comfort, hidden, judging, consuming. Divine refuses. She looks back. Life-sized, she feels less like a picture than someone in the room, and her eyes follow you as you move. You cannot walk past her unseen.

That is the reversal. She is covered and protected; you stand exposed. You came to observe, and you are being observed.

She does not need to show you everything to be holy. She only needs to look at you, and let you feel what it is to be seen.

BRUTON JONES Production Designer | Netflix’s A Different World

Thirty-Four Years Later, an Iconic Place Reimagined

How do you redesign a place that millions of people already carry in their memories? That was the challenge Bruton Jones faced when he was trusted to reimagine The Pit for Netflix’s A Different World. Thirty-four years had passed. The audience had changed. Filmmaking had changed. But The Pit remained sacred ground for generations who grew up at Hillman College.He could not simply rebuild it. He had to bridge two generations without erasing what made the original unforgettable.And for the first time in the show’s history, that responsibility belonged to a Black production designer.That matters. The authenticity of a Black cultural space lives in details no script can fully explain: the architecture, the objects on a counter, the art on the walls. A room can tell you where you are, who has lived there, and what histories remain. Jones calls it “contextual history.”The original Pit evolved through six iterations. Jones studied every one, kept what audiences would recognize, and opened the space to a new generation. His goal was not to reproduce a memory. It was to trigger one.Fine art became central to that work. Jones saw the storytelling already alive in Lisa Whittington’s paintings and reimagined five of her works as monumental murals. They carried their own histories into The Pit, adding a layer of narrative beneath the dialogue.“You don’t need dialogue,” Jones says. “You just need the visual cues.”Under his direction, The Pit became more than a rebuilt television landmark. It became a space where architecture, memory, fine art, and film carry the story together. Bruton Jones did not just recreate an icon. He understood what it meant to inherit one, and he had the vision to move it forward.

THE ARTISTS OF THE PIT

Different Voices. One Cultural Space.

The visual storytelling of The Pit extends beyond the work of one artist. Production designer Bruton Jones brought together a group of artists whose distinct creative voices contribute to the cultural identity of Hillman College.

Alongside the paintings of Lisa Whittington, the space features work by Abdoulaye Ahmadu N'Diaye (mural artist), Sanford Greene (graphic artist), and Nandi Jordan (mural artist).

Each brings a different artistic perspective to a space already rich with history.

Together, their work reminds viewers that The Pit is more than a gathering place. Its walls are a gallery of artistic voices, each with a story to tell.