BITS & BOBS & ARTIFACTS SPEAKING OF US & TO US.
When dealing with the almost daily effects of white supremacy and cultural appropriation, you eventually reach a saturation point. That point is usually what drives my writing. Saturation point was met on a Sunday morning while I was watching CBS Sunday Morning. There was a story about self-taught African American Folk artist, Bill Traylor. He'd been born a slave and lived through the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation and the great migration. The Smithsonian was featuring his art. The morning show interviewed Leslie Umberger, curator and self-taught Folk art expert.She proceeded to interpret what certain images Bill had used in his drawings, symbolized. I remember thinking: Everything she is saying, is filtered through the white gaze. She was interpreting the meaning behind the images with no frame of reference, no history or intergenerational legacy to draw from. I guess what I really wanted to see, was a Black expert on African American Folk art. An effort could hav...