too tired to produce another intellectual synthesis, so here is a historical anecdote instead.

to borrow from an intro on a Bob Dylan bootleg album, "this here's a little story about Shreveport, Louisiana," and the extremely transient part I played in its art history; but also, secondarily....

There are moments that reinforce my status as a mythic figure whose name I cannot recollect, but has something to do with being an archetypal Weird Old Guy. One such moment occurred yesterday when I was listening to Lois Reitzes’ interview with Jericho Brown on WABE’s City Lights program, in which he refers to experiences in his childhood and youth as he grew up, as he put it in the interview, “Black and queer, in Shreveport, Louisiana.” He went on to talk about Southern storytelling.

I was invited to lecture in Shreveport in 1989 as a visiting critic (or was that when they invited me back to hand out a juried art award?), part of an effort by local artists by get the same amount of recognition for Shreveport artists in general that Shreveport artist Clyde Connell had gotten, late in life (starting when she was 81), from the national art world and associated media. I did what I could for them, which I am afraid wasn’t much. At least one of them is a Facebook friend to this day.

As I recall, I was shown in passing, as we drove by en route to Clyde Connell’s home and studio on Lake Bistineau, the location of an alternative space run by younger artists and writers. I never got to see what they were up to.

I did get to see the work and the front door of the residence—he brought his work out when we asked if we could see it—of “Artist Chuckie” Williams, a self-taught African-American artist whose portraiture of pop figures such as Michael Jackson found its way into my Art Papers essay about vernacular art, a revised version of which was printed in volume one of Tinwood Books’ “Souls Grown Deep.” Bill Arnett said it was the only time that the name and work of Artist Chuckie would ever appear in anything with which he was associated.  I told him that Artist Chuckie was illustrative of larger social forces that operated on artmaking, independent of any aesthetic judgments about the work being created in response to those forces.

It is incredibly strange to think that at the moment of my visit, a thirteen-year-old African-American living in Shreveport was being encouraged by local librarians who responded to his intense interest in poetry such as Mark Doty’s that, as the Quaker idiom puts it, “spoke to his condition;” and that that incipient poet of 1989 is now a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor at Emory University. Just one more case in which I have been in the same city as significant figures, but long before they were significant.

https://www.wabe.org/podcasts/city-lights/jericho-brown-southern-storytellers-200-years-of-dekalb-exhibition-comedian-dan-weeks/