HARLEM

Before I Could Paint the World, Harlem Taught Me How to See It.

Harlem was never simply the place where I grew up. It was my first education in contradictions, and my first introduction to my culture.

As a child, I thought Harlem was Africa. I breathed in its spirit, its vibrations, its colors. Its politics, its extraordinary cultural wealth, its devastating poverty all shaped me, and I still carry the memories.

Harlem taught me how to read a city. Laundry lines, rent parties, barbershops, and record stores were more than ways to communicate. They were ways to survive. Fire escapes were more than a way out of a building. They carried a message: Black people needed an escape plan.

The buildings were more than architecture. They were structural spirits with windows for eyes.

I did not watch the man-in-the-house rule,---the welfare policy that kept fathers out of Black homes. I lived it.

Decades later, those experiences emerged in my paintings, not as nostalgia but as testimony.

Harlem did not become my subject. Harlem became part of the way I see.

Decoding the art

Harlem Child, the little girl with pigtails, is me. In A Harlem Story, my painted memoir of a Harlem childhood, I painted myself beside the father I never got to meet. I know him only through painting.

Harlem Baby comes from my own baby picture, which I kept for its quiet, reflective body language.

The buildings are not backdrops. I paint them as structural spirits with windows for eyes, because in Harlem they were alive with spirit, memory, and story.

Adinkra symbols run throughout the work. I came to this visual language as an adult, especially after visiting Ghana, and I use it to extend the stories on each canvas.

Anansi the spider is the newest presence in my work. In African and African American folklore, he is the keeper of stories, the trickster who outwits the powerful and carries wisdom across generations. He arrived in my paintings this summer, and in Harlem Baby and Anansi, the storyteller meets the child who will grow up to tell the story.

The gaze. In Harlem, somebody was always watching from a window, a stoop, a fire escape. My paintings carry that gaze. They look back. Who’s observing who?