3. Were there specific people from art
history that influenced your work?
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Elizabeth Catlett was one of the main
people that inspired me as a black female artist. She's just so amazing and
her work is so, so beautiful to me. At one point actually, I was supposed
to go to Mexico and study with her after I had graduated from BU and everything
had been arranged but my biological clock was ticking and I just wanted to
get married and have children at that time, so I did that instead. I took
a different path and I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone
to study
with her. I would have had to know Spanish which I didn't and that was one
of the things that discouraged me. Metta Warrick Fuller's work and the work
of other Black female sculptors became important to me. I certainly didn't
learn anything about people such as Augusta Savage
at BU. They were not in the art history curriculum. I learned about them from
my parents because they never stopped taking me to museums and they lost no
time in finding any exhibition anywhere that had to do with black art, particularly
black sculpture . They would take me, whether it was to Philadelphia or Washington
D.C., it was time for the family to go on an excursion to see this fabulous
exhibit. And so I was introduced to the Harmon exhibition in D.C. and a lot
of other shows that let me understand the work of black artists who came long
before me. And my mother, because she was an artist, and had studied at Howard
under Lois Mailou Jones knew a lot of people in the art world. She also was
such an
activist. She created an organization in Schenectady, where my parents live
now, called Black Dimensions in Art and that organization is devoted to bringing
black artists to Schenectady and having them exhibit in the museum there.
She founded another organization, The Hamilton Hill Arts Center and that's
just a very thriving institution which my sister runs at this point. So there
was no way I could escape knowing about black artists, relating to them and
frequently meeting them.