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Please visit our campus gallery within the Karl E.
Mundt Library to view the work Of Mr. Raines, a Fresno, CA resident who
shares his work with us during Black History Month, 2010.
Founders of Black History Month
“From the Actions of
One, the Sufferings of Many”
A talk with the
artist, William Raines,
February 3, 2010
What is the overall theme of this body of work?
I was interested in how I would relate to an
area I have never been able to visit. This unfamiliarity created a sense of
being displaced, which led to a realization of identifying oneself as being
from a certain place and yet still feeling displaced by exterior or internal
forces.
How do these works
interact in a meaningful way?
The drawings are a referent to a symbolic sign
of the First People of the Americans and the first people of earth as
Africans, the relationship through the sign of the arrowheads and a stoic
sign of resonance to a system of imposed positions by a travesty of
compliance.
Being an African-American with a
long history of political oppression and broken promises, I am drawn to the
treaties positioned on the First People of North America. In my research of
African-Americans in this area, I started uncovering articles of six known
lynchings. As I continued my research, I couldn’t uncover any record of any
of the First People who may also have been forcibly lynched during the early
years of conquest and settlement.
There’s a big absence of recorded
history of these colonized people. The arrowheads have symbolic relevance
across both African and Native American cultures, and for me are signifiers
of resistance to oppression through physical, mental and visual forms.
There is a spiritual, kinetic and
historical connection in displacement and disenfranchisement, perseverance
and strength. The juxtaposition of images in my drawings, portraits and
painted houses enter into a new relationship that the audience negotiates as
a contracted presence.
What do you want
viewers to gain from your work?
This show developed into making a presence of
the past with connections of self-reliance and strength. I plan and position
the work in a social frame without pointing fingers or declaring a state of
victimized being. This work represents a symbolic shift while reorganizing
an open narrative.
The houses refer to the loss of
home, particularly inspired by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans. Yet they also serve as a reference to standing alone and
maintaining the courage to move forward.
This courage of moving forward
springs from various teachers and leaders, people willing to put what they
have on the table, withstand a wall of obstruction and working for a
community of social conventions that we can talk and act upon, instead of
repeating rhetorical points of visual and political narratives.
Reception to be announced
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