KKK – Kin Killin’ Kin
July 13 – November 20, 2013
Curated by Willis Bing Davis
740 East 56th Place
Chicago, IL
From the DuSable Museum website:
KKK – “Kin Killin’ Kin” is a
powerful and thought-provoking series of images that reflect artists James
Pate’s deep love and even greater concern for the epidemic of youth violence in
the African American community. If he were a singer, he would sing about it. If
he were a dancer, he would dance about it. If her were a journalists, he would
join the thousands who write about it. James Pate is a master visual artist who
has directed his artistic vision to one of the most critical social ills of our
time…youth violence.
In the KKK-“Kin Killin’ Kin” series, James Pate reveals a negative social
reality in hopes of finding collective and positive solutions to a problem that
touches us all directly or indirectly. Pate’s
powerful images are visual call-to-action to find solutions to youth and gun
violence in the community and created in hopes of engaging our youth and
community in acknowledging that harsh reality of gun violence, and to dialogue
positive alternatives and solutions towards negative behavior.
ARTIST’S
STATEMENT:
I started working on the “Kin Killin’ Kin”
series in the year of 2000. In the middle of producing the first piece, I
decided that as a personal private protest, I would continue to compose a
rendering as long as these insidious acts continue. The concept of visually
comparing Black on Black terrorism to Ku Klux Klan terrorism came directly from
conversations among us in the Black community. It is often said that we [African
Americans], in a “strange fruit” kind of way, are doing the business of the KKK without Black-on-Black violence. So, I was moved
to use art as a means to illustrate this sentiment, complete with brothers in
pointed hoods in the ‘hood.’ Every piece that I complete is also my way of
accepting responsibility as a member and team player in my community. Every
piece is a moment of silence and dedication to all the people who have to deal
with our losses.
In 2005, after a colleague viewed a few pieces
from this series, he gave me a copy of an article that was written three years
earlier by Hakim Hasan, director of the Urban Institute at Metropolitan College
of New York. Published in Savoy magazine, the article was titled, “Hip Hop
Lynching: The Thousands of Young Black Men Dying Each Year on the Street are
This Century’s ‘Strange Fruit.’ This Time the Blood is on Our Hands.” Mr. Hasan
wrote the piece after seeing the Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America exhibition at The Visitor’s Center at the Martin Luther King Jr.
National Historic Site in Atlanta, Georgia. The gruesome photographs and
postcards on view depicted the mutilated remains of Black men, boys and women
as well as White men. Lynching was a ritualistic public square violence, part
of a sordid history of White criminality. In “Hellhounds,” an essay published
in the exhibit’s commemorative volume, Without Sanctuary, historian Leon F.
Litwack writes that “Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,742 Blacks met their
deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.”
Hakim Hasan stated, “As I studied the
photograph of a Black man burned beyond recognition, I wondered what would be
the response if this were a photographic exhibition of Black-on-Black homicide
victims from Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Los
Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Newark and New York?” According to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, from 1976 to 2000, 94 percent of Black homicide victims in
America were killed by other Blacks. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention
cites homicide as the leading cause of death for Black males between the ages
of 15 and 34, with 4,412 such victims in 2000 alone, the number of Blacks
murdered by other Blacks since reconstruction far exceeds those lynched by
Whites.” Sadly, this pattern continued year after year, leading up to this
present day in 2011.
The feeling of blueness is the true drive
behind the discipline to produce these works. Like a bluesman, I’ve found
myself strumming the medium instead of a guitar in order to compose an image
that will help cure my sorrow. Part of my sorrow and frustration is due to all
the abstract layers of blame that beyond my purview. I chose a representational
format of imagery to help make the point as clear as possible to unveil an
in-depth look at the end result of this elegy. I wanted the overall appearance
of these pieces to look somewhat like oversized storyboard frames that were
created from a movie script or screenplay. The surface needed to be embellished
with metaphoric symbolism and precious innocent bystanders caught in the cross
fire along with the perpetrators as victims themselves. I must depict how each
episode of destruction is chipping away at a people’s essence, ancestry and
heritage; a rich legacy of sacrifice, struggle, triumph, glory, positive
influences on the world; and the entire groups’ future.
From the offset of describing my vision I felt
a strong urge to juxtapose aesthetics, technique and craft to the
unpleasantness of the subject matter. While relating this disappointment my
secondary target is to entertain the spectator with basic elements and
principles of design and illusion. This is achieved by introducing ideas of
manipulating rhythm, shape, light, shadow and form in conjunction with weaving
perspective and depth of field.
The entire focus of this series may shed the
impression that I’m launching an assault on hip-hop and youthful behavior and
activity in the last twenty-plus years. It’s difficult for me to conveniently
judge these actions without feeling a sense of responsibility and a need to
sift thought the menu of possible reason for the dysgenics. The assault is
actually on whatever breeds dysfunction, on the germ and not the visible sore,
and whatever turn of events that yielded this result.
I hope that troubled youth, young adults, drug
traffickers and gang members will see these images and scenarios as a negative
and not the model that will support their hopes aspirations and potential. This
project is worth every stroke if one child can be moved to look forward to
gaining skills that cannot only provide a means for healthy survival, but also
self-expression. I placed historical imagery in some of the compositions with
the hope that an adolescent will feel a real sense of their bloodline
connection beyond their own parents and grandparents. As an artist, my fuel
tank is always full just by realizing that I am a part of a lineage that
designed and built ancient Egypt. If Jacob Lawrence can create a series of
works depicting the south to north migration of the American Negro then I can
chronicle this period in our history when “Kin Killed Kin.” There is no doubt
in my hope that this wound will heal. But until that day, I will channel as
much of my creative resources as I can for the purpose of influencing change. This
series will live to remind me of a picture that began to fade prior to being
restored. The images will warn and alert us to not repeat this history. As
shameful as this topic may be, I need the imagery in these renderings to simply
tell the children the truth.
James Pate
KKK – Kin Killin’ Kin is organized by SHANGO: center for the Study of African American Art and Culture, Inc.,
and EbonNia Gallery. Curated by Willis Bing Davis
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