art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

iii. case narrative
case study: xavier university of louisiana 51
voices:
John Scott, Professor of Art, Xavier University Department of Art
Richard Thomas, Xavier Alumnus and Founder of Pieces of Power
john I was told by Sister Lurana my freshman year, [that] Xavier had
a system called the Artists Guild, and everybody studying fine art
had to compete for [the commissions that came in to the guild].
I would never compete because I’m looking at all these guys around
me, and I can’t compete with this. I’ll never forget, Lurana came
to me one day and said, “You have two choices. You either participate
or you leave. We don’t have spectators here, so either you get in
the game or you find another team to play on.” That was the bottom
line. That’s how I learned to do what I do. The teachers were
saying, you can’t watch an education; you have to get educated,
get in the game.
richard As African Americans in the late seventies, when I graduated, we
had very little movement taking place in our community. We’re still
breaking new ground in terms of our cultural identity, identifying
with Africa and the African aesthetic, with a Black American or African
American aesthetic, understanding all that, making sense of it.
I also [got] my ideas about giving to the community, giving back
as far as making progress, when I was a student at Xavier. Doing
what’s needed, having heart and soul and a consciousness, selfdetermination.
When I got out of college, I realized how [few]
resources [were] available for young African American artists such
as myself at that time. There weren’t many venues; most galleries
were rejecting the work. There was such a need to. . . expose my
community to what I was doing, and then that led to exposing my
community to what other artists were doing. And so my focus
started that way. Then I got into painting murals.
Community murals belong to the people, and it comes out of
people like Diego Rivera and his understanding of how you develop
your community, educate your people, and empower them through
your art. So sometimes, you have messages you want to communicate,
sometimes fiery messages, important messages, it’s not just
propaganda. . . . Understand that there is a vehicle. You may not get
paid for what you do, but it’s a vehicle so that you can [use to]
communicate. For me, that’s really the key. And then I realized as
I progressed in it, our educational part of it is what stuck . . .
developing the youth, developing those artists . . . getting their