Don't Hate.

I took Angelbaby to the Birmingham Museum of Art last Saturday. We went for the first time a couple months ago and she requested this second visit. (My baby loves art, I'm so proud.) Along with the same old crap, we saw several featured artists that were really quite good. The first was Bill Traylor. He was an "outsider artist" which I only recently learned is the term for someone who has not studied art formally. Personally I take the view that school or no school-art is art and elitist bastards that want to ruin it for everyone can piss off. Moreover, if you've been to art school and your work is still shite, get another profession-you are not an artist! I will be sure to explore that subject further on a later date. So where was I - Bill Traylor his work is mostly in pencil and crayons on pieces of scrap cardboard. Individually the drawings were not that impressive. But after viewing the entire collection his style starts to grow on a novice critic such as myself. I was impressed further by the black and white photos by Edward Weston hanging along side the drawings depicting Mr. Traylor as he worked. 25 stone sculptures by William Edmondson were also featured as part of this exibit entitled the Modernist Impulse. The major exhibition was One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics by Birmimgham born Kerry James Marshall. Mixed media including painting, sculpture, video and photography. Heirlooms and Accessories was a piece that most affected me. Marshall's quietly nightmarish "Heirlooms and Accessories" casually drapes locket pendants that contain the faces of three white women over a barely discernable, faded background of six lynched black men accused of improper conduct. The work recalls a time when such strange fruit was considered justice. In an interview with Jeffery Brown, Mashall said: This piece was sort of a reminder that these people are accessories to a crime in the first place, and that the heirlooms and the things that their offspring inherited from them were inherited from them because they were engaged in this kind of violence. It made me really think about my role in racism. The only time I ever dropped the "N bomb" in front of my dad I was pre-school age. My dad whipped his head around with a quickness and demanded to know where I had heard that word. In the wisdom of my 5 years I replied "everybody says it." (Everybody as in- other kids in my neighborhood.) "Everybody doesn't say it! You don't know what that word means and you don't know who's feelings your going to hurt by saying it. And I mean you'd better never say it again!" And that was it. That was all my dad had to say about racism. When I started school I learned very quickly what racism was. From elementary to high school, my schools were the last ones in Birmimgham City to be plagued by white flight. So the ratio of black to white students was 50/50 almost until I graduated. We were constantly hounded by the subject. Once, in middle school, two students were arguing over an eraser which broke into a fist fight. Someone had apparently used the infamous "your mamma" rebuttal and all hell broke loose. Because one student was white and the other black, they were sentenced to inhouse suspention where they were subjected to made for school movies about racism. OVER A FUCKING ERASER. Anyway- to me, Marshall's art implies that if you are a witness to hate then you are an accessory. I can honestly say I don't associate with people who hate. (To the best of my knowledge.) I wasn't taught to hate. I don't teach Angelbaby to hate. My question is: In this day and time, what more can be done?