Rest in Power Faith Ringgold

Artist, innovator and pioneer, Faith Ringgold has transitioned to Ancestor. Born October 8, 1930 she has had an immense impact on art and activism over the course of her career. Her presence will be missed. Gone but never forgotten. (10/08/1930 - 04/13/2024).

Representation Matters…

It’s important to be able to see yourself in the world around you…

Method to The Madness...

We The People?

(Reprint)

…I was involved in a car accident once, rolled the car three times off the road and into a patch of jungle in Panama. There was broken glass rolling around inside the car with me and sliced up my arm pretty good. (I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt) I was happy that I was alive and able to walk away with minor injuries, so the cuts on my arm seemed minimal.

Months went by and that arm was always hurting, a year went by and that arm was still hurting. About a year and a half later, the arm was hurting and I began rubbing the spot where the scar was, the rubbing turned to picking at the scar…and I felt something just under the scar. With a little bit of pressure I squeezed and I saw something starting to poke through the skin…I’ll spare you the details, but turns out there was shards of glass still embedded in my arm the entire time. After it was removed the arm healed and didn’t bother me anymore.

I said all of that to say, in a social capacity…metaphorically speaking my arm has been hurting since Trayvon…and the shards of glass are still stuck in there while America argues about how to pull it out

“For Trayvon” from the Series “We The People” by artist Howard Barry aka @hbcreative

Enough!

…shortly after the video of Ahmaud Arbery began flooding my social media timelines, I knew that I was going to end up doing a tribute, eventually. Since I began working on my series titled “We The People” I’ve done far too many tribute pieces to both honor the memories of those killed and to shed some light on their individual stories, but truth be told there are moments where it is overwhelming and depressing. That’s where I was emotionally when I heard of Ahmaud (and several other deaths that happened around the same time). I knew I was going to create something, I just wasn’t ready yet…or so I thought. I went on Instagram in an attempt to distract myself and one of the first posts I saw was a post by Cree Summer. The post was a video of her youngest daughter, the savage princess Hero Peregrine Stormborn. Young Hero was expressing her outrage…a tribal yell that I felt in my soul! I was instantly convicted and got of social media and commenced to creating a tribute piece for Ahmaud using young Hero as my inspiration.

Groove Theory

““Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” ― Plato”

Tears of a Clown

Now if there's a smile on my face
It's only there trying to fool the public…

One of the common threads that connects my work, is pain. Early on in my artistic journey, I found myself drawn to artists and creatives whose creativity seemed to come from a place of pain and hurt. My curiosity with this connection between pain and creativity has grown into an art obsession. Initially the focus was on musicians, but recently I turned my gaze towards those who make us laugh,   thus, the birth of this series titled “Tears of a Clown.” Somewhere in between the laughs there is often pain and darkness. The gifted ones spin their tales in such a way, that the laughter anesthetizes us as they unload their pain on us.

These are a few images from the series, hopefully soon I will be finish with the series and compile the images into an Art Book…

2019 in The Rear View Mirror

It’s out with the old, in with the new! Well, not really. I definitely want to be a better version of myself in the coming year, but everything from 2019 wasn’t a wash…there are valuable lessons and experiences that I am taking forward with me and building on. I closed the year out on the momentum of my Solo exhibition “Inertia”. I consider it the Prologue of a Visual Art conversation I want to have with my public art going forward.

Howard Barry, artist posing with his piece titled “Wanted” medium is coffee, ink and graphite on canvas “Inertia” 2019