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The Representation Issue
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Playlist
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Pictures
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Words
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Thoughts
No. 1
Winter 17
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Playlist No. 1
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C.R.E.A.M. Wu Tang Clan
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Accordion MF Doom
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D-Boi (Interlude) Outkast
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F.U.B.U Solange
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Legacy Jay Z
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Chanel Frank Ocean
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Imagine Snoop Dogg
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The revolution will not be televised Gil Scott-Heron
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Black Sunday Sebastien Pierre
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Words with Jayson Scott Musson by Elizabeth Karp-Evans
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You’re from New York, but you grew up in Philadelphia. How do the two cities compare? My grandparents live in the Bronx, and my dad lives in Queens, so I grew up there. I lived in Philly as a teenager until my early thirties. I love Philly; it’s a shithole. They have great parties;
I actually go down there to go to parties. I have keys to my old a partment and I’ll go with business in mind, but just stay for three days. People there are carefree.
Did you move back to New York to get serious about art? Yes, but when I first moved, I didn’t have even have a studio. My gallery is Salon 94, and the woman who runs it owns a massive New York townhouse. I had a show there last summer, and also lived in her house. I spent an entire summer literally half a block from
Central Park. That was my first summer back in New York. But you need a place to mess up. I have a studio, but I still work out of my house: I write and draw in the living room, I paint at the kitchen table and I’m setting up an office to draw. I like working from home.
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“If someone gave me party in Philadelphia,
Most people in New York seem to run high on interests and low on time. Was it easier to produce work in Philadelphia? In Philadelphia, you have much more free time as the cost of living is quite low, but having a great deal of free time doesn’t guarantee productivity. I partied like a motherfucker in Philly. I made art too, but dawg, I got it in. In NYC, because time is so scarce, I think people here are more aware of the economy of time and treat time like a precious commodity. I think there are
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some benefits to that; there’s kind of a hustler’s air to NYC, which I find inspiring, but the downside of that is the absurd amount of business cards you’re prone to receive at parties. If someone gave me a business card at a party in Philadelphia, I’d head-butt them. In New York it’s, “Hey cool, thanks! I’m gonna go to the bathroom.”
e a business card at a , I’d head-butt them.”
When was the moment you felt you could make decisions solely as an artist, that moment when you knew you’d achieved success? “Success.” There’s a lot of ways to describe success. Some folks think it’s in money, others in attention, others in redefining your field, and others believe it lies in personal fulfillment regardless of attention or money or being a part of some vanguard. I feel like I was first successful with [the poster series] Too Black for BET (2002); it was the first body of work I made where I
was truly able to input my own personality into the work, to convey my voice in a manner honest to who I thought I was at the time, which is really hard to fucking do.
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How did that project begin? When I was a junior or senior, I was a computer lab monitor. It was right when the color Macs came out, but students weren’t allowed to use them yet. The head of the department was this crazy egomaniac.
Remember in school, there were the good computers… ...Yeah, and the clunkers. We had a whole lab full of nice ones that no one was allowed to use, but I had to watch the lab. I would sit there by myself and make stickers in QuarkXPress for like four hours. I began writing more and rambling on and that’s how Too Black for BET came about. They were originally broadside posters, and when they’re exhibited, they’re three-byfive-foot Xeroxes. For a while, I never wanted to pay to make art. I was really into the idea of stealing stuff from Kinkos for shows.
The writing predates your Hennessy Youngman videos. It’s decidedly frank, while taking on very large cultural and critical ideologies. I was twenty-three. When I started writing the actual larger poster works, I had just broken up with a girl. You know how you have to break up three times to really break up with someone? Well, that shit was combusting, the relationship was failing. I think I cut my dreads off, just gave up on all my ideals, and that’s what the piece Have You Ever came out of.
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What made you want to write a book at this point in your career? I make visual art, but in the end I’m more drawn to writing and storytelling. I grew up reading and writing comic books as a teenager. With The American, I was never under the assumption that I was going to make a viable book. Paul Chan, the publisher at Badlands Unlimited, is an artist, so I didn’t sit down and write the book in a traditional, dramatic structure. It’s set up like a video game, where each transition in landscape is how the story progresses. The main character doesn’t learn anything, and the story ends really weirdly.
The premise of the story is based off of a character, “The American,” who I previously painted. He’s standing on top of a pile of skulls. He gets visited by the ghost of Henry Ford, and Ford tasks him with traveling across America and fixing the ills of the country. He goes to Disney World to destroy the It’s A Small World ride because it
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promotes pluralism; he goes to San Francisco to deal with the “homosexual scourge”; he goes to Slovenia to confront Slavoj Zizek; and then it ends in Dubai. The main character is a cross between the Little Prince and Terminator, very naïve and violent, and even through he triumphs at the end he still thinks America is still unfaultable.
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Thoughts 35
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Is calling someone an oreo a compliment?
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Oreo A term for someone who is,“black on the outside and white on the inside.� Black in skin color with white characteristics.
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My white friends seem to think of it as a form of affirmation. “Yeah you’re like black, but not like black black.”
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My black friends don’t. “Why do you always want to do some white people shit.”
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I tend to refer to myself as an adversely racialized nominally black male. Those are the attributions given to me, but I know that these things do not exist in reality. Therefore I don’t incorporate it as something within my own sense of myself. Resistance of the false identity itself is what im suggesting is worth talking about today. - Dr. Carlos Hoyt
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Social Construct A concept or perception of something based on the collective views developed and maintained within a society or social group; a social phenomenon or convention originating within and cultivated by society or a particular social group, as opposed to existing inherently or naturally.
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The O’Reilly Factor November 12, 2003
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O’REILLY:
What if an 11-year-old kid imitates you, Cam’ron? What if he uses four-letter words and he develops a lifestyle based upon the street, he gets tattooed, he gets all of this, do you feel badly about that?
CAM’RON:
No, I don’t.
DASH:
Can I interject?
O’REILLY:
Go ahead.
DASH:
If an 11-year-old were to imitate Cam’ron, what they would be doing is becoming a CEO Of their own company, controlling their own destiny, taking a bad situation and making it good. He has a record company. He’s sold a lot of records. He’s acted in movies. I feel like he’s a positive...
CAM’RON:
I have a cologne also.
DASH:
He has a cologne.
CAM’RON:
I have a clothing line.
O’REILLY:
Well, you know what I’m talking about, Damon.
DASH:
Well, no, he’s an entrepreneur by his own right.
Racialization the act or process of imbuing a person with a consciousness of race distinctions or of giving a racial character to something
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“Dude, it’s like, a good thing.”
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How?
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I’ve tried explaining to them that this idea of “acting white” is superficial and stifling for people of color but...
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“It’s not that deep.”
...they don’t se
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“You sound white as hell right now.”
ee it that way.
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Too black for the white kids, and too white for the blacks - Earl Sweatshirt
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So no,
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I don’t take it as a compliment.
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