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frattystuff · 14 days

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#frat #frat boys #vineyard vines #sperrys #no socks #cole haan #driving Mocs #on running

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xtrablak674 · 7 months

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Urban Soul Revisited

What you may see at first is a smartly dressed man sitting on, well lets revisit that later. Upon further exploration you may also notice this is a Black man, with locs wearing pants from Prospect Heights designer Jimi Gureje, shoes by Cole Haan, a shirt he hand selected the fabric for on his 2011 trip to Ghana and had made locally on his first visit to the mother continent, finishing off the outfit a turquoise necklace he pulled from his paternal grandmothers costume jewelry and eye glasses by the socially conscious Warby Parker.

Now back to where he is sitting, he is situated on a left over stoop in DUMBO you can’t see this but all he hears is a cacophony of construction sounds, what he doesn’t see is the graffiti, murals and wheat pasting that used to draw him to this coastal part of Brooklyn. What you can’t smell is the gentrification of a borough he has lived over twenty years in, a borough he reps harder then its former president Marty Markowitz, and one he rarely leaves unless traveling abroad.

You would think the Urban Soul he was portraying was a commentary on the special style of fashion worn by Brooklyn fashionistas, or maybe it could be something else like the life blood of neighborhoods he has walked for over two decades and construction and conversion has weeded out the ethnic appeal of this cities neighborhoods in exchange for a regurgitated sterilized Manhattan step cousin of the ‘new segregation’ known as gentrification.

Let’s go a little deeper because what we perceive isn’t always what is true.

“He” is actually, a non-binary same gender loving Black person and even though he may respond to male pronouns she will also respond to female ones, he long ago accepted that she was what the indigenous people called two-spirited and e embraces the duality of es nature and the natural conflict of es soul. And like the doorless stoop e sits on e is all but invisible to people disappearing in a country that would readily imprison or choke the life out of em and discard em in the street.

You can’t think about a city and not think about what makes that city special which is its people, people are the spirit of any city and should be embraced not erased, so you can have your artesian tea and farmer markets to squabble over the best organic tomatoes but you also need to have the mentally unstable homeless man who sits outside of the Bodega begging for spare change. This is what makes up a cities Urban Soul.

Part of es Colombusing Series, a commentary on gentrification, change and being invisible in one of the most visible cities on the planet.

[Photo by Brown Estate - As I re-read this I remember getting into some kind of dispute with the curator of this exhibition Ramona Candy, whom is also an artist. She was missing the significance of the use of pronouns in this artist statement and how I deliberately presented one gender identity and switched to another near the end. Albeit this was before where we are today when folks literally list their pronouns in the footer of the LinkedIn profiles. I wanted to make a point here and I pushed her to respect my very elaborate Spivak pronouns which even for me are not easy to use.

Its such a commentary about timing, but it also speaks to my artistry I wanted to send a clear message to the viewers of the work that I am not just what you see, there's something below the surface which I want recognized, albeit it started with the curator I wanted it ended with the consumer of the work. This is what art is challenging the viewer in ways they hadn't thought of before or realized.]