KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

ARTIST STATEMENT

Kerry Stuart Coppin

I am an American artist of African descent. A “documentary-style” photographer, my work addresses issues of African American cultural identity and community experience. Unique interpretations of American cultural experience… Provocative, in the context (or lack thereof) an imaging-arts, and entertainment industry, which has all but ignored this segment of the American population.

It is my ambition to produce provocative photographic interpretations that elaborate and celebrate positive aspects of Black community experience while documenting contemporary American experience. I am convinced (in the words of bell hooks) that “the lives of black people are complex, and are therefore worthy of sophisticated critical analysis and reflection…” Picasso stated that “painting is not done to decorate apartments; it is an instrument of war against the enemy…” I am trying to use photography as a tool, an instrument, to “change the way we as Black people look at ourselves and the world…” I hope through my work to contribute to our sense of a world community, to help “create a world where Blackness, and Black people, can be looked upon with open eyes…” I recognize that “there is no naked, honest, simple way for it to be done [for a white man to look at a Black man],” but perhaps, as Black people, we may look at each other…

When the national media addresses issues of race, particular to the Black African American community, it often addresses only those large urban (North American) Black communities of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago…While teaching at Kansas State University, in rural Kansas, I came to recognize and appreciate a rural black experience, significant in number, as diverse and complex as those in major cities, which has gone unrecognized and undocumented. And, even more significant, are the experiences of peoples of African descent in the rest of the New World. Virtually unknown and undocumented are the lives and experiences of an “estimated 150 million persons of African ancestry in Latin America…”

I had never considered this larger community of Black people, isolated from their African ancestry, living in the New World. I recognize now a larger context for my visual photographic research: “Africans Born in the Western World.” I am presently utilizing all research and exhibition opportunities to enlarge the sphere of my visual research interests to include the “First World”, but also to include those present and former colonies of first world nations, western countries, regardless of economic or political orientation. But, particularly to address those Western Blacks with a history of slavery and social, political, and economic repression, including but not limited to all the countries of the Western Hemisphere.

I traveled to Dakar, Senegal in June 2000, 2001, and again in 2002, as a means of establishing contextualizing images for this ongoing and long-term project of visual and oral research. I have traveled to Havana, Cuba five times since the spring of 2000 to photograph for the purpose of a project I call Negro de Nación / Cubans Born of African Descent. I am attempting to extend travel in Latin America and the Caribbean for the purpose of documenting Black community experience, cultural life, and customs. These photographs, exhibited alongside images of North American Black communities, construct a portrait of Black cultural life as we enter a new millennium [a hoped-for period of joy, serenity, prosperity, and justice…] Photographs are powerful instruments of cultural and economic change…Through photography, I not only attempt to interpret and record my experience, but also to participate in an ongoing debate on the fate and shape of the Black cultural experience.