This drawing from the What Do Brothas Do All Day ‘zine was a special challenge. My goal was to recall the men I’ve encountered at my favorite local grocery store and to depict them in a way that would make clear that they were food shopping, but without actually representing the store itself in the background. Instead, the background image is a repeating image of a cluster of fresh vegetables, a simple pattern that allows the figures to fully dominate the foreground, despite the limited color palette.
Here’s another image evoking the HBCU marching band tradition. (HBCU stands for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.) This drawing uses the same background image as the previous drawing, but with a different color palette.
Here’s another drawing from my newest ‘zine. The image in the background is an early photo of the Florida A&M University (FAMU) marching band. The photo was taken during the 1940s, long before the indictment, conviction, and sentencing of several of the band members for the 2011 hazing death of FAMU drum major Robert Champion. The uniforms on the drawn figures do not represent one particular Black college band, but rather the HBCU marching band tradition as a whole. The photo in the background is offered as a reminder of the distinguished history of HBCU bands and as a call for the rejection of the brutal hazing that has overshadowed this powerful legacy.
Like the previous post, this image from my latest ‘zine takes a contemporary figure and dresses him in Harlem Renaissance-era clothing. The music he’s listening to is W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (as sung by Bessie Smith).
Here’s another image from the What Do Brotha’s Do All Day ‘zine, and this image did, in fact, show up in the Alternative Press Expo version. It’s two men I saw laughing outside a barbershop in East Oakland. I used a little artistic license to dress them up in Harlem Renaissance-era (1920s) clothing and hairstyles.
This drawing of two men sunning their toes at Alameda Beach was initially intended to be in my What Do Brothas Do All Day ‘zine, but I ran out of time. I was premiering this ‘zine at the Alternative Press Expo and I only had enough time to complete a portion of the pieces I was going to include.
The great thing about doing your own publishing, though, is that you can create new editions of your work whenever you want. This drawing will be a part of the new and expanded version of What Do Brothas Do All Day, the one that’s available on Etsy and at Art Murmur and the East Bay Zine Fest.
Ajuan Mance
PS: The background image is from a vintage postcard of what the publishers claim is the San Francisco skyline, but it doesn’t really look like San Francisco to me.
Unlike the other drawings in this series, this was inspired by this image from the New York Public Library’s digital collections. To the left of the figure in the coffin, I’ve created a cutaway image of the layers of soil beneath the headstone where he will be buried.
This image from the What Do Brothas Do All Day ‘zine includes an excerpt from “Little Brown Baby,” a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I’ve reprinted the text of the excerpt below.
Ajuan Mance
***
Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes,
Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee.
What you been doin’, suh — makin’ san’ pies?
Look at dat bib — you’s es du’ty ez me.
Look at dat mouf — dat’s merlasses, I bet;
Come hyeah, Maria, an’ wipe off his han’s.
Bees gwine to ketch you an’ eat you up yit,
Bein’ so sticky an sweet — goodness lan’s!
—From “Little Brown Baby” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, in Poems of Cabin and Field (1895)
