About

I work mainly in text, collage, photography, and other media. My practice can best be described as “participatory action art.”

I believe in the connection between beauty and justice, and consider ways to bridge conceptual art with more “common” endeavors. To paraphrase the Caribbean poet and activist Amir Cesaire, I believe that justice sits at the gates of beauty, and beauty sits at justice’s gates as well. I attempt to suggest to the viewer that there are different ways of thinking and looking at things, and that art can play a role in this pursuit. The result has the potential to be a more humane world.

Probably like all artists, my art comes out of my life experiences. My creative work is a product of my internal psychic and emotional life, and most explicitly from my life in the world.

Born in St. Louis, after spending a couple years as a young child in New Orleans, I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas in the aftermath of the efforts to integrate Central High School. In high school and college, I was drawn into the maelstrom of movements for Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. In the 1970’s, I worked as a union organizer and served two years in the US Army during the Vietnam era. Starting in the early 1980’s, I have been a union and civil rights lawyer in the South and Southwest. In my first case I represented migrant farm workers in southern Arkansas who were held in slavery by the local sheriff, until all the tomatoes in his county were harvested.

Frustrated by conditions for what my social worker grandfather called “the lost, the least, and the last” in our society, I worked to analyze my experiences. I stepped back, taking an academic turn. I studied the “Classics” at St. Johns College and earned a Master’s in Divinity at Harvard University in 2007. For nearly a decade after graduation I was a Fellow in Ethics and Responsible Investment at that university and was a Visiting Scholar at CUNY during 2018.

I have been a writer throughout my life, beginning with poetry in high school, a “movement” newspaper while organizing in factories Cincinnati, and a GI newspaper in Germany during my military service. From 2008 – 2018, I wrote a bi-weekly column, “Raising the Bar,” in the East Bay Express newspaper in Oakland, California, which analyzed contemporary events. In 2011 I wrote, Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty, a book which details the story of the rich and complex relationship of Navajos workers and American railroads in the desert Southwest.

This journey has now led me to the visual arts, and an attempt to continue this arc of my life with these media.

Participatory action art is art which comes out of my life experiences, especially those centered around my contribution to struggles for social justice, especially for the working class.