art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

56 art / vision / voice
and I wanted to go to Booker T. So I literally got thrown out of class
so I could go to Booker T. And that’s where I met Albert Jean, who
was a protégé of Elizabeth Catlett. [All that] set designing and all of
that stuff that I was doing, I did in high school because this man
had a core of us, Larry Songy was one of those people. He worked
at the post office at night to supplement his income, so if we had to
do opera sets, he’d make a sketch on a paper, turn it over to us, and
he’d come back eleven o’clock at night and check on us. So I was
literally going to school from eight o’clock in the morning until
twelve, one o’clock in the morning. And when I got ready to go to
college, I was really thinking about going to California. He said,
“No, you’re going to Xavier.” It wasn’t a request. He took me to meet
Doc [Numa Rousseve]. And like you, again I came out of high
school a high C, low B student, going to Xavier and walked in on
Frank Hayden, Lurana, and those people. [As a student,] Frank
Hayden was a giant in college, and like you, I’m coming out of
high school, I figured, “shit, I can do this.” And you walk in with
professional people and you go, “whoa, this is something different.”
But I think what really got me when I first walked in is that
these people had a thing that they were doing, and if [they] handed
me something, and I’d say “thank you,” [they] didn’t say “you’re
welcome,” [they’d] say “pass it on.” The only way you could thank
people for giving you something was to pass it on to somebody
else. I heard that the first day I walked in. And it’s been a way
of life for me ever since.
Lurana once said to me, “You know, you’re going to really, really
do well at what you do,” and I’m looking at this woman like she’s
got to be crazy. Here’s this black man talking about being an artist
in 1958. She said, “Everybody will always underestimate you, so they’ll
always get ambushed, they’re not going to know what’s coming.”
That’s the way she taught us.
I never intended to teach nobody, nothing, never. When I got my
degree from Michigan State, I got a phone call from Lurana and in
the phone call, she was actually representing Rousseve and herself,
and they asked me if I’d come back to Xavier and teach for a couple
of years. There’s no way I could say no, I mean, these are my mentors
saying “we need you.” And I told them, “Okay, I’ll come back and
give you a couple of years.” That was 39 years ago.
The ideal is that to me teaching has never been about academics.
Teaching is nothing more than passing on information to people
who just don’t have it yet. That’s what it’s about. And it became a way
of life, and like you said, it’s not like giving back to the community,
it’s passing on to the community what’s theirs.