Hi Everyone,
Inspired by my experiences at Oakland Art Murmur, SF Zinefest, and the Alternative Press Expo, I have created a shop on ETSY. At the 8-Rock Press store you can buy prints of some of the art from this website. I’ll be adding additional items in the near future! I hope you’ll drop by and take a look! Click on THIS LINK or click on the word “shop” at the top of this page.
Best,
Ajuan Mance
I’m just coming off a wonderful and exciting weekend at the Alternative Press Expo. During the Expo, I did six drawings of attendees, and I can’t wait to post them. I should, however, finish up one family of pics before I start another series. So, here’s another drawing of Black men in suits, a theme that began to get my attention about a month or month or so ago. I seemed to see Black men in suits everywhere. Here are two more.
Ajuan Mance
… a composite drawing of the three Black men I saw during the morning rush in the financial district, downtown SF, September 5, 2012.
Ajuan Mance
Last week it seemed that everywhere I looked I saw a brother with lots of hair. This week my eye has been drawn to Black men wearing suits. It all started on Saturday night. A friend hooked me up with excellent seats at the Andre Ward vs. Chad Dawson fight (at Oracle Arena). The audience was almost as much fun to watch as the fight itself. A lot of the folks in attendance were dressed to impress. Women were wobbling up and down the bleachers in outrageously high heels and men were styling and profiling in suits and ties that ranged from tasteful and understated to outrageous and excessive. Since that night I’ve had suits on the brain, and the next several drawings are composites of the men in suits I’ve spotted over the last several days.
Ajuan Mance
This stone-faced gentleman was among the throng of unhappy customers waiting for service at the Best Buy wireless communications counter late Sunday afternoon. I had no idea so many people could have so many difficult tech questions, purchases, and returns so late in the weekend. It was a marathon queue session that would have been absolutely intolerable without the company of one of my best grad school friends, Michele B., who was purchasing a wireless hotspot. All of that waiting was just more time for us to catch up on each others careers, relationships, and travels. Best wishes to my very old friend! Can’t wait to see you again in November!
Ajuan Mance
At Friday’s Oakland Art Murmur, I was selling small zines of selected drawings from my blog. I had a table at Uptown Body and Fender, and from where I was seated, not too far from the rear door, I had a great view of the attendees entering from the back parking lot of the building, where a local band was playing. I could hear also hear many of their interesting (and sometimes not-so-interesting) comments as they passed by. This man continues my theme of Black men with lots of hair, something I’ve been noticing a lot in recent days. My favorite thing about this drawing, though, is the 19th-century photograph of The White House that I used in his thought bubble. As he passed by my table” this man and his female companion were talking about the current president and his chances for reelection. Just as he was moving out of earshot, I heard him say, “If I was in the White House…”
Ajuan Mance
We’ve all had the experience of hearing a song that gets stuck in your head for hours. Well, the same thing sometimes happens with the things you see. You catch a glimpse of something interesting or unusual–or even something you see every day, but that somehow catches your attention in an unusual way–and you continue to notice the same kinds of people or places or objects wherever you go. One example of this took place after I read the first Harry Potter novel. Once I finished the book, it seemed, all of a sudden, that everywhere I looked there were little boys in round glasses and little girls with bushy, brown Hermione Granger hair.
Last week I watched a DVD of one of my oldest friends performing in a recent flute recital. She played several solo pieces and two duets, one with her older son on violin and the other with her younger son on piano. At the time of the recital her younger son was sporting a remarkably large afro, reminiscent of my grammar school years in the 1970s.
Ever since I saw that DVD I have been noticing Black men and boys with lots of hair. I guess you can say that brothers with big, bushy, afros or long, luxurious deadlocks are on heavy rotation in the part of my brain that governs what catches my eye. The man in this drawing is the best of both worlds. The size of his cap says nothing if not that he has some very long deadlocks, but they’re piled up onto his head and tucked under his cap in the shape of a big, bushy afro.
Ajuan Mance
I recently made a trip to Malvern, Arkansas (pop. 10, 318), as part of a public history project on which I have been working for the last three years. I grew up in the New York metropolitan area and–despite regular visits to see family in Laurel, Delaware (pop. 3, 708) and Darlington, South Carolina (pop. 6, 289)–I have developed some not-so-fair assumptions about small-town Black, southern communities. During my weekend in Malvern, the graduates of that city’s segregated high schools (the district integrated in 1968) were having their triennial all-class reunion. These reunions draw graduates from the local area as well as from all across the country, and everything I saw about the local area graduates and their children and grandchildren upended every stereotype I’d previous held about small-town Black folks. The young people were sophisticated and stylish, but also very welcoming and kind to those of us who were visiting from outside. In addition, the adults in attendance–the aging men and women who graduated from high school when the “colored” schools were quite separate from the white schools in the city–were enthusiastic ambassadors for their community. While many might believe that Black people remain in small towns only when they have no other opportunities, the segregation-era graduates who have remained in Malvern have done so by choice.
The young man in this drawing, a grandson of a 1950s-era graduate of the city’s “colored” high school, impressed me with his thoughtful analysis of what made Malvern great. Here’s what he said:
This is where your roots are deep–deep in terms of family, in terms of friendships, in terms of your church family. There are families who are living a house where their great-grandparents once had their first house, going to the same church the great-grandparents went to, and making friends with the sons and daughters of the people who were their grandparents’ and parents’ friends. You move away, you lose all of that. And that’s who you are. Why would anyone want to lose whose they are?
Ajuan Mance
PS: The shadow in this drawing contains a partial map of the city of Malvern.
Ajuan Mance
With this drawing, my 2012 Comic-Con sketchbook comes to a close. I might create and post a few more monsters in the future (I really enjoyed doing drawing #365), but the next drawing will reflect some of my other recent travels–around California and to some other points farther away. One of the highlights of the conference is the number of people of all ages, races, and abilities dressed as their favorite film, novel, tv, and comic book characters. For this year’s Comic-Con drawings, I focused on a small subset of the cosplayer demographic. Farewell costumed attendees. I’ll just might see you in 2013!
Ajuan Mance
The Comic-Con sketchbook continues. Since so many news stories portray Black men as monstrous I decided to take some inspiration from Comic-Con and draw a real African American monster, the Black werewolf. For those who have trouble distinguishing the monstrous from the human, the drawing above is a monster. The brother you see walking down the street is not.
Ajuan Mance