Discovering a Lost Art
By Larry Saxton
WI Contributing Writer
Thursday, April 24, 2008

  
James Brown Jr. is a fiber and textile artist, born and raised in Harlem, N.Y. He attended the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has a BFA from the University of Florida at Tampa, and an MFA in printmaking from Howard University.
  
Brown is a member of several professional arts organizations including SPIN-International Silk Painters, BADC (Black Artists of D.C.) and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. He has been a docent at the African Arts Museum Smithsonian Institute and his work has been displayed in shows throughout the country.

WI: In addition to being an artist, you are a registered nurse. How did you get started in nursing?

JB: Trying to make a living in New York City as an artist was very difficult. Back when I was starting out, the kinds of jobs available were paste-up and layout positions in the graphic arts arena. In those days, everything was done by hand; we didn’t have computers. The Harlem Hospital School of Nursing had a program that allowed anyone who was interested in pursuing the challenging career of a nurse to apply. I decided to take on the challenge and became a nurse. I met my wife at the Harlem School of Nursing and I retired after 25 years.

WI: What influenced you to begin working with textiles in your art work?

JB: Both of my parents were involved with textiles in their work. My father was a tailor, a carpenter, interior decorator and an upholsterer. My mother worked in a factory on a sewing machine; she made her own clothes, and was a milliner. The textile thing was kind of in my blood. Another major influence was the study of African Art at Howard University with Professor Kwaku Ofori-Ansa, and being able to study the collection at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art while I was a docent there.

WI: Tell us about some of the fabrics you make to work with in your art.

JB: There was this workshop at the textile museum, and I became fascinated watching this woman wrap these different color strands around this round object with soap and water. I found out she was wrapping wool from the sheep. It was the beginning of a hat and she was making felt. Learning the process of felting took me about a year, and ever since then I’ve been making my own felt. I spin my own wool thread for stitching and embroidering on my tapestries.

WI: Do you use a machine to do your stitching?

JB: All of my stitching is done by hand. In Africa, the brothers are stitching by hand. When I was growing up in Harlem, like in most Black communities, there was a cleaners on every corner, and in that cleaners was a tailor, and that tailor was a Black man. It is a lost art in America today for the Black male, so what I am doing is a lost art.

WI: You also paint on silk. What inspired you to get into that?

JB: During one of the annual conferences of the National Conference of Artists in Washington, D.C., there was a workshop given by a sister who had her own silk painting business in New York City’s garment district. After a few minutes in her workshop I said to myself, I know I can do that. That’s how I started painting on silk. The earlier silk paintings were very tedious; I would sit and draw, and draw, and then begin to paint, and if there was a break in the silk, the paint would bleed and the piece would be ruined. I would paint on dry silk with a wet brush. It was all very tight work. My first silk painting class showed me how to paint on wet silk, and freed me from all the tension I would have painting on silk. I began to experiment, using different methods to produce images on the silk. The silk painting class really freed me.

WI: What’s next for James Brown Jr.?

JB: I am working on a series about words and language. It all began with my grandnephew asking the question of his parents “what is our language?” He was attending a multi-ethnic school and he noticed that all of the other kids had languages of origin, and he wanted to know what his was. How do you tell a Black child what his language is? You have to talk about slavery and Africa and how we came to be in this country. It bothered me for a long time and I kept telling myself, you have to do something about this. I went to the computer and started researching African languages and found out that were about 2,000 different languages on the African continent, and even more dialects. I started incorporating words from languages that could have been ours before slavery into the graphic work that I am doing. Now I am adding information I’ve learned from my family’s DNA test. It’s just in the beginning stages, and getting bigger and better.
  
For more information on James Brown Jr. and his work visit www.yessy.com/vandadesigns or e-mail at jamesbdc@earthlink.net.