By Kendra N. Bryant
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Zora for Valerie Boyd & ‘em
June Arts and Healing Focus
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Medium: Collage on paper, stickers & ribbon
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Creating a work on Zora Neale Hurston might seem trite for a Florida literary journal. However, years ago, while I was a student of Deborah G. Plant, Hurston scholar who edited Hurston’s Barracoon, I asked her, “How much more can we write about Zora?”
Just as much as we can write about love, she said. & so it is.
Zora for Valerie Boyd, however, isn’t just an homage to Hurston. It, too, acknowledges Valerie Boyd, Hurston biographer whose 2003 Wrapped in Rainbows reintroduced the world to Hurston with the same audacity & fervor as Alice Walker did when she named Hurston “Genius of the South.” Boyd, who died in 2022, was genius, too – for she recognized the love in Hurston & bound it in book form so that we may know it, too.
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What is your concept of an art “community” for building creative alliances with individuals across different identities?
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My first thoughts carry me toward God the Creator & the Creation story — including those of varying religious & spiritual practices — which is a story of love, abundance & peace. If folks stepped into their higher selves & sat in that divinity, then what’s possible is a spiritual community of folks whose existence is a practice in recreating love, abundance & peace.
While many of us have been conditioned to limit creative arts to the fine arts of painting, architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, performance & photography, & to analyze their intentions to enjoy the beauty expressed therein. . . as human beings made of the universe, each of us has a creative ability — a skill that, for those who cannot do it, is an art.
What if K-12 schooling developed a national CORE arts curriculum aimed at tapping into & honing students’ creative selves to ensure a democratic America versus mandating a hidden curriculum bent on developing competitors whose creative energies are spent competing, separating, appropriating & extracting?
I guess, therefore, my concept of an art “‘community’” — a utopian experience, if you will — begins in the K-12 environment that historically has been extinguishing children’s creative selves, their divine selves born into the universe with an authentic capacity to love.
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What are your thoughts about art as a creating form of inner-healing and human well-being?
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Undoubtedly, the act of creating is a meditative practice that invites the doer into a contemplative space where healing & freedom is possible. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, the present is the only place where one finds freedom.
In doing art, the artist is transported into their practice — into a free space that mutes the outside world. Even when the artist is creating a work about worldly events, doing so requires the artist to go inside their selves to do the actual creating. In that space, in that quiet space, the artist is invited over & over again to touch their hurt & to breathe. Akasha Gloria Hull’s 2001 Soul Talk explicates this idea more thoroughly & more beautifully than I can here. Go read it.
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Kendra N. Bryant, Ph.D. (s/hers) is a Black lesbian (barely) middle-class womanist, a fraternal twin who enjoys reading, writing, singing, dancing & shucking & jiving to & about all things Black. She spends too much time theorizing about white America’s hypocrisy; fangirls over Alice Walker; writes tankas & haikus; & trips the light fantastic to Kanye West, Aretha Franklin & Lauryn Hill.
When the spirit moves her, Kendra paints & collages, too. She has been commissioned to illustrate two book covers: Affirming One Florida. The One Florida Initiative: Reversing Reverse Discrimination (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2021) and Blues for Amiri. Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State UP, 2021).
However, she endeavors to be a renowned poet. To date, she has published circa ten poems, the latest publication, “sonnet no. 1 for the Black Lives Matter Movement,” appeared in the online Glass: A Journal of Poetry, 2020. Kendra is currently working on a manuscript. In the meantime, Kendra N. Bryant works as an assistant professor of English at North Carolina A&T State University where she directs the composition program & teaches various English courses.
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