Third floor lobby, Kaiser Oakland.
Ajuan Mance
Ajuan Mance
Category Archives: Dreadlocks
1001 Black Men–#649
World Ground, MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, California.
Observation: Dreadlocks are kind of like the rings on a tree. You can see a lot of the history of a person’s relationship to their hair in the color and texture of them. For example, if a brotha’s locks are reddish on tips, black for 12 inches or so, and then gray at the roots, then he was probably dyeing his hair when started them. Then, along with his natural hairstyle, he also went back to his natural color, which began to shift from black to gray as the years wore on. If his dreadlocks are gray (or white) all the way from the roots to the tips, then his hair must have been gray for a pretty long time.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men–#612
I passed this gentleman and his seriously beautiful dreadlocks on the sidewalk near Spectator Books on Piedmont Ave. I didn’t have a current photo of that street on my camera, and so I used for the background a stereoscope photo depicting turn-of-the-last-century Broadway in Oakland, instead.
Ajuan Mance
1001 Black Men–#600
Today marks the 600th entry in my series of 1001 drawings of Black Men. Of course, the images in this series depict many more than 600 Black men, and some of my drawings include two, three or even as many as 30 different figures. Some of my subjects are drawn from life, some from memory, and less than a handful from photographs that I took on my phone.
Last Saturday night I found myself at the New Parish in downtown Oakland. The event was the WERQ! Vogue Ball. After the excitement of spending the day at the San Francisco Zine Fest, I was a bit too tired to enjoy such a high energy atmosphere, and I found a quiet corner in which to sit and do some people watching. This brother reminded me a little of a young George Clinton, if George Clinton had worn dreadlocks back in the day. That and the fact that he was wearing sunglasses indoors and at night made a deep enough impression on me that I immediately brought him to mind when I sat down to my sketchbook the next morning.
Ajuan Mance