This drawing depicts a composite of photo I came across in The Colored American magazine and a drawing of man I saw on a poster for an early Black film. I gave him a somewhat modern shirt and undershirt, but I added the bow tie in order to include an element that could connect him to almost any decade between the early 1900s and now.
Ajuan Mance
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been watching a lot of The Ultimate Fighter reality series. I am a committed and enthusiastic fan of mixed martial arts (especially the UFC), and about three 36 episodes into the back seasons that I missed became obsessed with evaluating the likely UFC weight class of almost every tall-ish and somewhat athletic man that I encountered. For example, while I was waiting for the attendant at the meat counter to wrap my spare ribs, I tried to figure out which weight class each of the butchers might be if they were mixed martial arts fighters. I decided that the man in this picture, would definitely be in the heavyweight class. He was exiting the grocery store as I was walking in, and he was easily the tallest guy I’d seen all day. Even as I write this, I acknowledge that evaluating random men for their possible UFC weigh class might be construed as problematic and even objectifying. Fortunately this obsession passed as quickly as it came, to be replaced by a much more benign interest, in finding the perfect UFC T-shirt.
Ajuan Mance
It’s taken me a while to get this drawing up on the website. I misplaced it for a short time, and then, when I found it, I had to take a short break from posting in order to finish a work-related project. I’m glad that the pace of my job has slowed enough for me to post so many of the drawings I’ve completed over the last few weeks.
This drawings depicts a gentleman I encountered at Zocalo Cafe. He was kind enough to let me get ahead of him in line. I think he noticed how heavy my computer bag was on that day. In this drawing, I tried to capture his expression of quiet dignity and absolute non judgement. He seemed to be looking at me and the other customers with neither curiosity nor disinterest. He seemed more present in the moment than anyone I’ve encountered in a long time.
Ajuan Mance
I spotted this fellow artist at the Blick art store on Broadway, in Oakland. This drawing depicts him gesturing to a container of acrylic gel medium. He was pointing it out to the one of the employees, from whom whom he requested some information about price. We were both on the same aisle and looking at the same thing (acrylic gel medium, extra heavy, semi-gloss), and so I couldn’t help but notice him. And when you run into a fellow Black artist who just happens to have an amazing beard, and you’re trying to create a series of 1001 drawings of African American men…well…was there any question that his image would end up on my blog?
Ajuan Mance
Here’s another drawing inspired by my day in Alameda’s Park Street Starbucks. The man in this drawing was part of the mid-morning break crowd. He came in with a couple of other guys, similarly dressed in short sleeve shirts, ties, and cotton slacks. They were already involved in an animated conversation about Governor Jerry Brown when they entered the store. The conversation only got livelier with the addition of coffee. In this picture, one of the guys is poised to make a point, with hand gestures at the ready.*
Ajuan Mance
I really enjoy doing father-son drawings. I haven’t included many so far, but I hope to include a lot more in the future. I saw this pair walking down the street in Alameda where I was writing at the Park Street Starbucks. For this drawing, I brought their faces closer together for the sake of composition, and I gave them matching shirts. Then I added a jazzy mid-century version of the logo along the left-hand side.
Ajuan Mance
I love drawing textures, and I’ve realized that I don’t do enough of them. Glad I could make #340 an homage to the coolness of texture and line.
I was recently up in Garberville, California. There are not a lot of Black folks up there, but I was pleasantly surprised to see at least one other besides me and my partner. This guy was chatting with friends on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store. He was wearing an old-school sports jersey, the type of which many people used to wear in high school in the ’70s and ’80s. Even in Northern California, far from Oakland, we still acknowledged each other with “the nod,” and then we each went on about our business.
Ajuan Mance
Do you watch The Ultimate Fighter? I am a big fan of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), including it’s largest promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC); but I had never seen the UFC’s reality show, from which many of its finest athletes were selected, until earlier this summer. Not surprisingly, when I watched the first episode of the current (recently completed) season, I was hooked. I watched the entire season, and I enjoyed every minute. Fortunately, I still had 14 seasons worth of back episodes to watch. The second season I watched was season eight, on which a young contestant named Junie Browning quickly became one of the most notorious contestants in the history of the program. His hair-trigger temper and moody personality became his trademarks, and he was nearly kicked off the show several times. He was what my mother would call “a holy terror.”
Junie Browning is a young white man from a Southern family, and so when I saw a young Black man who looked a lot like him walking around in downtown Oakland, I was more than intrigued. For this drawing, I have dressed the Junie-Browning-looking Black kid in UFC shorts and the same kind of backwards cap that Browning wore on The Ultimate Fighter season 8. If you get a chance to watch even a single episode from that season, you will see how much the young man in this drawing resembles that very memorable MMA fighter.
Ajuan Mance
Just a quick drawing of a man I saw outside of the Laurel Bookstore on MacArthur Blvd. Be cause was a tall, thick guy, he was hard not to notice. But it was the seriousness of his gaze that kept him on my mind the next time I sat down with my sketchbook.
Ajuan Mance
This is a drawing of a one of the attendees at the C-19 conference back in the spring. It was held at UC Berkeley and it drew 19th century American literature specialists from all over the country. In the panel on the future of 19th-Century African American literature studies, this scholar asked a great question. Oddly, although I can remember that I really enjoyed his question, I cannot remember anything about what he asked. I can remember that he identified himself as a graduate student, but that’s about it. I guess his question was so amazing that my mind to was not able to store it without exploding from its brilliance.
In the background of this drawing are W.E.B. DuBois and other African American scholar-activists from the Niagara Movement, a civil rights organization founded in 1905. I have incorporated this image into the background as an acknowledgement of the debt that all scholars of African descent, around the nation and the world, owe to DuBois and his compatriots. We truly stand on the shoulders of these men and women (none of whom a picture here, incidentally) who fought so many battles to create a space for the Black intellectual.
Ajuan Mance