AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 4

ARTISTS & ARTISANS
do you think that plays into how you view
Blackness, especially with these different
points of cultural reference?
MR: I feel that a lot — even just growing
up between New York and the South —
gave me a whole different perspective on
blackness. Because in the South, the racism
is more outward and up here it’s a little
more hidden. So even the whole thing about
what it means to be Black in the South, is a
whole different thing than what it means to
be Black in the North. Which is funny to say,
because it sounds like we are talking about
some Civil War shit. But it’s that way.
AC: You didn’t go through any formal
training; you are essentially self-taught?
MR: Yeah, other than my family who
knows how to draw. I had an uncle who went
to college for art. I stayed with him for a
summer and he gave me a boot camp, if you
will. In the basement he had a little studio
setup. [In it] he had a stack of Playboys from
1960 to now; and a bunch of Double XL; a
bunch of Source Magazines and he would
tell me to go through all that shit and by the
time he [got] home to draw something from
it. I would go through the images and would
try to draw something. He would come
home [and] look at it … look at the original
picture and be like, “I don’t like that. Do it
again.” I’d be like … Ok,” and then I would
do it again. Then he would come home the
next day — look at the picture — and be like,
“I don’t know … Try it one more time.” Then
the next day he would come home and he
would look at all three images and he would
[be] like, “Yeah, this is the one.” Then he
would go across all three and [say] “Do you
see the difference between [them]? The nose
in this one was a little off; you fucked up the
eye on this one”… He did this to me for weeks
and weeks and weeks, and by the end I got
pretty good at looking and drawing. But that
was the only schooling I [had].
AC: Tell us about Glory. What inspired
this new work?
MR: Glory is like the new decade. We
are on the other side, we are understanding
ourselves more, we understand our
issues and our flaws, [and] we are on the
other side building to a more glorious presentation
within ourselves. There’s more
than just Oprah. There’s a lot of other people
in these boardrooms, and a lot of people
making decisions [who] are more relatable
to us. Black women are the number one
business owners. We are really taking a
hold of our future, and now everything is
televised, so you can’t really do us like you
did [in] Black Wall St. So it’s more of a scary
time for them because you can’t really just
hush hush niggas like that. You can silence
one or two and try and get away with it, but
you can’t silence niggas like that. So I believe
this decade is going to be the decade that
we really strive, and really prosper in a real
way. We are here and we have been here, but
now it’s just on a grander scale. I just want
to be the artist that represents us as we [get]
to this grander scale, as we are making this
transition.
Black is beautiful, and can be seen in
this light: We can highlight our features,
we can highlight our hair, we can highlight
our noses, we can highlight our big lips. We
can show our style off. I feel like a lot of the
things they try to put us down about are
really just showing us our glory.
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