I always enjoy watching people who use particularly animated gestures during conversation. This guy is a perfect example. He was standing in line with a co-worker at the Los Pericos Taqueria near the Southland Mall in Hayward. He was describing a pass that he saw in some recent college basketball game. It made for an interesting contrast with his work attire.

Ajuan Mance

I was thinking about one of the people I met during my 1998 trip to Cairo, Haifa, and Jerusalem. I was only in Cairo for 5 days, and I met surprisingly few people. There was so much to see that we were almost constantly in transit. Recently, though, I was looking at news coverage of the political unrest there and wondering what happened to this guy. He was the desk attendant at our hotel, The Golden Tulip Flamenco, in Zamalek, an affluent community on Gezira, an island in the Nile River. This gentleman was friendly and welcoming, even though we arrived on the day that the U.S. military had bombed the Sudan. He gave us a comfortable room and answered all of our stupid questions about room service, laundry service, and transportation. I hope he’s okay, and I hope that peace and stability come to his country sooner than later.

Ajuan Mance

The Jack London theater crowd, part II.

Ajuan Mance

This drawing and the next (#483) depict some of the men I saw in the very long line last Sunday at the Jack London theater box office. Sunday is $5 movie day and, as I have since learned, it is the most popular day of the week. That means it is also the day on which your film of choice is most likely to sell out before you reach the ticket counter.

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Artistic License: The Sequel

This is the second of two drawings based on my co-worker who is not African American. Race serves such a fascinating topic function in art. These two drawings gave me the opportunity to play with the idea of borders between ethnicities and identities. As I worked to make a sketch based on an Asian American subject appear recognizably African American, I also took note of when the moment occurred when this drawing of an Asian American figure began to look like a Black person. I’ve done the same thing with drawings of women (but not on this blog). It’s always interesting to see what group of lines or what type of shading transforms the appearance of a drawing from that of a woman to a man or a child to an adult or a white/Native American/Asian American person to a Black person and vice versa. Some might say that this suggests the construction of racialized identity categories. I say that to depict a figure with any identity is to construct and deconstruct that identity in the same handful of penstrokes. In the process of drawing raced figures are we not unmaking the means by which Black/White/Asian/Native American looks are made?

Ajuan Mance

I used quite a bit of artistic license in creating this and the next drawing (#281). Both are sketches of one of my co-workers, completed during a meeting. My co-worker is a talented artist and poet and one of the my favorite people in the department. He is not, however, African American. He is actually Vietnamese American, but he’s such a great subject, and I liked my drawings so much that I had to incorporate them into the series. Soooooo … I actually made some very minimal changes to the original drawing, mostly of his hair style and the suggestion of a tightly curled afro style. Also, I altered his jacket lapels so that they would differ from the next drawing, in which I didn’t change the style of his clothing at all.

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I was waiting at a stoplight at the corner of MacArthur and 35th when a man with a 1980s flattop and a large Bible in his hand stepped off the 57 bus. I’ve drawn him as an African American minister, but incorporating a late 19th-century photograph of a Black church congregation and some old sheet music for the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” These collage elements link him to the long tradition of African American Protestant Christianity. The sheet music in the background is taken from The Book of American Negro Spirituals, edited and arranged by African American brothers, composers, and educators James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamund Johnson. The collection was first published in 1925.

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On Superbowl Sunday, when the national focus on is Black men at the peak of their athleticism, I decided to put my own focus on a Black man at the peak of his wisdom.

Now, back to the game!

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I saw these three guys on School St. between Brookdale and Boston, and so I decided to place in the background (in silhouette) a the church (I think it’s a church) at the corner of School St. and Boston. It’s the third building in from the right. The other silhouettes I designed to look like the Victorians and craftsman-style homes so common in that area.

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Here are two men I saw on a recent trip down Brookdale Ave. They were hanging out, chatting, and putting up the occasional shot on the courts right near MacArthur. There are so many different communities and experiences that fall under the heading of Black Men, and about 100 posts ago, I mentioned that I was trying to incorporate more of those demographics who never make their way into my sketchbook. Among those constituencies who I have rarely drawn are the young brothers in the oversized white t-shirts and sagging pants. I see these men all the time, as I drive up and down High Street; but I have rarely created portraits of them. Part of it is my age, I think; and part of it is my experience. I tend to sketch people who feel familiar to me. That means I draw a lot of nerds and a lot of guys in suits, v-neck sweaters, or both. Still, though, the point of this project is to capture the full diversity of Black men’s lives and experiences. The point is to step beyond what is comfortable and easy and to capture brothers of all ages, aesthetics, and occupations. I need to level up.

Ajuan Mance