This is one of ten large-format pieces on display at the 1001 Black Men exhibit at the CIIS main building in San Francisco, 1453 Mission, third floor.
Ajuan Mance
This is one of ten large-format pieces on display at the 1001 Black Men exhibit at the CIIS main building in San Francisco, 1453 Mission, third floor.
Ajuan Mance
REI, Berkeley, CA
This is one of ten large-format pieces on display at the 1001 Black Men exhibit at the CIIS main building in San Francisco, 1453 Mission, third floor.
Ajuan Mance
See this painting and others (plus 200+ images from this online sketchbook) at the 1001 Black Men exhibit at the CIIS main building in San Francisco, 1453 Mission, third floor.
Ajuan Mance
This is the second of ten paintings in the 1001 Black Men show at the CIIS Main Building in San Francisco. For this show, I create a series of figures who are composites of many Black men I have thought of and/or imagined. I tried to put together a representative sampling of the forms of Black manhood and masculinity that I have encountered over my many years of drawing African American men.
Ajuan Mance
The painting is one of a series of ten paintings that I created for my current show, available for viewing at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). The show is titled “1001 Black Men,” and in addition to these paintings, it features 203 images from my online sketchbook. These pieces will be on display until August 3. CIIS is located at 1453 Mission, in San Francisco. Follow THIS LINK for more details.
Ajuan Mance
Here’s one more drawing from my college reunion. This is one of the undergraduate temporary workers who was staffing the college reunion events. In this image, he is peeking into the door of Sayles Hall where the members of my graduating class were attending our reunion dance. When we graduated, back in the late 1980s, the student in this drawing hadn’t yet been born. I can only imagine how curious it must have looked to see a room full of middle-aged men and women laughing and talking, and dancing to a bizarre assortment of 1980s and late-’70s tunes.
Thinking back to the moment at the dance when I saw him peering into the door of the hall, I wonder if seeing older folks come back to campus gave him the same feeling that it gave me when I was a senior. When I graduated, reunioning alums from the class of 1983 all the way back to the class of 1913 were in attendance, reconnecting with members of their classes and welcoming us, the newest crop of grads, into the family of alumni. Back when I was a 21-year-old graduating senior, the sight of all of the older folks returning to the campus gave me a profound sense of being a part of something bigger, and that recognition filled me with gratitude and pride. 25 years later, I wish all of the current grads–the members of the class of 2013–the same feelings of mingled gratitude, pride, and connection.
Ajuan Mance
I’m really backlogged on drawings; and when I say backlogged, I mean that I’ve done loads of drawings in the past two months, but I’ve had very little time to get them up online. Still, I am taking a brief interlude from posting my backlogged work, all in order to show you this drawing I just completed today. I just got back from a research trip to Brown University’s John Hay Library. The trip overlapped with my college reunion, and so I used my study breaks to participate in some of the weekend’s reunion activities.
I graduated from Brown a couple decades ago, and since that time, the college has become both more selective and more diverse. I have to say that watching the 2013 graduates march down the hill made me very proud, and even more so when I thought about the fact that despite the fact that admission to all of the Ivy League schools is more competitive than ever, the Brown has become even more diverse and with a greater proportion of Black students than when I was a student.
Go Bruno!
Ajuan Mance
This guy’s flight was delayed, so I guess he decided to park himself against a wall and get comfortable. He’d taken off his shoes, and so I guess he was pretending that the waiting area at the gate was a beach or a park, except with a really dirty rug instead of grass or sand.
Ajuan Mance
Hi everyone! I’m so glad to be back! Between creating new work for a show and traveling to see my parents, I have been away from my online sketchbook for the longest time yet in the nearly three years since I began this project.
I have not, however, been away from my real life sketchbook and I have 38–that’s right, 38 new drawings to post. I’m going to get as many as possible out in the coming week, because even when my posting gets a bit slow, I continue to make new art in my offline sketchbook (from whence the drawings originate).
I was recently in the airport and, even though my flight was delayed and I had to be completely rebooked on a different itinerary, I actually had a very pleasant day. The secret? Leaving my computer in my office and checking my luggage. When I fly, I usually carry my anvil-sized laptop and I also bring my clothing in a carry-on bag. Between carrying the computer bag over my shoulder and wheeling the suitcase, moving around through the airport is kind of awkward. Without those items, I felt light as a feather, and that alone was enough to put me in a good mood for all four legs of my roundtrip flight to Nashville, TN and back. Add to all of this my Bose noise-cancelling headphones (and I mention these by name because they are pretty much the best there are and you should really, really buy them), and I actually enjoyed my 4.5 hours on board each way.
The man in this drawing is one of the many Black men I saw in the various airports through which I passed. He was standing in the food court area near my departure gate in Oakland, wringing his hands over the apparent stress of deciding between Burger King, Otaez (a local Mexican restaurant with a food stand inside the Oakland airport, and Peony Asian Cafe (yes, I realize how vague that name seems to be, given the immense size and diversity of Asia). In the end he went for the King, taking comfort, I suppose, in the flame-broiled familiarity of America’s number two burger chain. Personally, I can still remember my time as a teenage employee of the number one and number three chains, and that alone has destroyed my faith in the idea that fast food burgers are made of food. (They are fast, though.)
Ajuan Mance