Virtual Resources for: "A Bold and Beautiful Vision: A Century of Black Arts Education in Washington, DC, 1900-2000"

James A. Porter:

When I first had the opportunity for formal training, it was in Washington, DC at the Armstrong High School. Where I pursued as a major art and architecture. I remember very distinctly having worked first of all in wax, and then in the tempera, and even a little oil paint. Later on, I moved over into the courses in architecture and had some experience of rendering uh Greek and Roman facades in the conventional way of that

time.

Dr. Billy Taylor:

Prior to getting to Virginia State I was in high school at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. Because of racial prejudice in Washington, DC, this was an all-Black school we had five instructors with doctorates on that faculty. So we got like a prep school education. This was a public school, but we got all the cultural things that one would expect in a private school. And Henry Grant was the band director there. And he was just a wonderful band director. I mean he had Frank Wess the tenor player, we were in the same band. Being in that context, I was lucky because not only did we have Frank and I have  Henry Grant as a music teacher,  we had James Reese Europe's sister, Mary Reese Europe also on that faculty. Any number of people that have achieved all kinds of things that went to Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. It was a marvelous school. So we're very lucky.

Elizabeth Catlett:

I went to Lucrecia Mott Elementary School and Dunbar High School which is very famous high school. That high school started in my mother's church in the basement.15th Street Presbyterian church. And Dr Grimke's brother was the minister there. And they started a high school for young people who wanted to go to college and there wasn't one. And later on, they moved into a small building that later on, that building that was Dunbar High School where I went. I liked to draw and paint and my mother used to bring me materials. She was very supportive and I would draw paper dolls when I was about eight or nine years old I would draw paper dolls with huge

Wardrobes. And then I thought some people, some friends would ask me sometimes you know, “Make me one make, me one.” And so then I got the idea that, we didn't have any money at all, I got the idea that it would be nice to charge them 5 cents you

know a nickel for a doll and an outfit. And later on, when I went to high school, I used to do some drawings, projects for the teachers at Miner Teachers’ College. I had a nice

a very nice experience in high school, and that's when I decided I wanted to be an artist. That's what gave me some direction in art. That's all I can base it on, is when I decided that I was going to work with the problems of Black women, when I was going to try to make people see them as beautiful, dignified, strong people instead of as Ralph Ellison says, invisible. Another aim I have is to take art to our people who do not go to museums and to do this we have to get art by our people into museums.

Dr. Pamela Harris Lawton

I'm Dr Pamela Harris Lawton and I'm a fifth generation teacher, born and raised in Washington, DC. Education was a way to move forward and to move up. Because DC was an area where you had one of the first HBC,Us, a very extensive one with a medical school and a dental school and all these things and then you eventually had Miner Teachers College, it was a place where you could be right at home and yet go to school and get an education. From my great-great grandmother, to my great grandmother, then to my grandmother Edith, and then to her children, my mom Patricia and her sister Louise, all went to Miner Teachers College.

I became interested in Thomas Hunster or introduced to him because as I say my grandmother Edith had this profile painting portrait oil painting of her mother my great grandmother Jenny. And her high school art teacher painted it. That's what she told me. And I said, “Well who was that?” and she just said “His name was Thomas Hunster.” And I have that memory you know. I've had that memory I've kept it with me for years and hadn't thought about it much, right? I just remember that painting. I just thought he was a high school art teacher, and I never thought more about it. He wasn't just the art teacher at the M Street School and Dunbar High School, but he was also the art supervisor for all of the “colored” schools. So that meant he was in charge of what happened with visual arts for K-12 schools on the on the “colored” side of the public school system. And so he was always looking for things that would be cutting edge and innovative.

So how could one man make such a big impact on art education alone? And so what he did was he found those best of those students and trained them to help train other students. And so then it gets to this point where he's then training elementary school teachers to in drawing, you know basic drawing, so that they could then teach the students. And then he got to a point where he said well, “Just like Walter Smith we need to have people who teach specifically art.” you know don't want to put it all on the classroom teacher at the elementary side. I think he was instrumental in starting the art education program at what was Miner Teachers College at the time. That whole art education program happened because of him. I think that that's one thing that's a real testament to his legacy.  

I was pondering on why somebody who basically started art education in Washington, DC for Black children, how they could be forgotten. And I think part of it is, it's part of what I'm studying myself now. I think there's this kind of horrible thing in a way that when a person devotes themselves to teaching more so, than say their art practice, that people will say “Oh you know I've had this great teacher” but they don't necessarily talk about them a lot. Like I don't know how much Alma Thomas talked about Thomas Hunster. I don't know. But I think that that's part of it, that there are great artists who all have had a teacher, but how often do you hear them talk about who their teacher was?

When I think about my own education and studying the history, for example of art education as a profession, there's no mention in a lot of the books that we use in teaching our students the history of art education about Black art educators. I really feel like as art educators we need to keep those folks alive and that's really important.

Sylvia Snowden:

I graduated from Howard in 1965  and at Howard I had the best experience and I think the best education that anyone could have. I mean I had James A. Porter, James Wells James L. Wells, Lois Mailou Jones, Lila Asher,  David Driskell. Now those people are really instilled in us an appreciation and a duty to your craft. To honor your craft and to be the best that you could. They elevated us from from just a mere craft to “Oh we are elevated.”  “We are artist and we must always, always respect that.” We just found out were mere kids after we graduated. These people were not only teachers, they were people who were pursuing their own careers in the visual arts, and they're very, very good at it, very good at it. What they did was with honor- the way they taught that the kids, the students, was with honor. The way they treated their work was with honor. They didn't look upon it as wasteful. Not wasteful. That was a good time to be educated in art, very good time, and I've taught in a lot of places and I have never taught in a place where in this country and in other countries where there were more dedicated teachers.  

Lois M Jones James A. Porter and James L Wells. Those three people were just out of this world. They really were. They knew they knew everything that they need to know about their craft and about their art.  But Lois Jones did take a group of us to Paris to go to school. We went to school there. Then she took us to the south of France. That was my first experience in Paris. And, it really it was nice. But you know we were young, 18 years old, you know. She made sure we saw everything. I mean we went to the Opera. We saw everything. Howard encouraged you to do your own style. They believed in you, too. They believed in you. That was good, you know. They truly did. They did nurture you. But, I meant they didn't coddle you like babies. They didn't do that. No and they let you know whether or not you had the talent or not, too.

Dr. Starmanda Bullock:

As an undergraduate that was the place to be. I mean I saw that as “It was my place.” it was my calling. It was the place to be. Lois was my mentor. I learned a lot from her. I did my earlier work studying under her. James Wells. We spent a lot of time in the studio. He would teach me a lot of his techniques. He was a printmaker. James A Porter I did my dissertation based on what he had taught me. He was my soulmate. He was part of me. And he was a gentleman. He was everything you he wanted him to be. He was tremendously an artist. And he spoke that way. His work was that way he was wonderful.

Elizabeth Catlett:

James Herring who was head of the department and James Porter taught drawing and painting, and Wells taught printmaking and some crafts.  And Lois Jones taught design. It was like a new world for me, really. I think Mr. Porter influenced me more than anybody else. I realized working with him that you can't be an artist. Some of the art the artists in Washington that taught school were like weekend artists and they didn't have much they didn't produce very much. And Porter didn't produce very much, but in the summer he and Lois Jones, and I didn't know about Mr. Wells , they would go somewhere and paint. And he encouraged us to be full-time artists and that's what I am now.

David C. Driskell:

One of my professors, Mr. James Wells, I took a course in drawings from Professor Wells. I was drawing. This was as I recall the spring of 1952. And I looked around and over my shoulders, there was a tall , very well-dressed, looking down at my drawing and he said “What is your name?” And I said “David Driskell” He said “I don't know you. Are you an art major?” And I said “No .”He said “Well what is your major?” And I said “History.” He said “You don't belong over there, you belong here.” That was James A Porter. So I went and changed my major. He represented, if there was ever a role model for me of what I wanted to be, it was Professor Porter. He was… He dressed well. He spoke well. He was so knowledgeable about his subject. And when I went into the classroom to pursue a course that he was teaching called “Modern Negro Art” he used his own textbook. And I was impressed with the fact that there were these professors at Howard, all using their own textbooks. They were brilliant. They were perhaps the brightest people in those subject areas in the world. They were landlocked, so to speak, at Howard. They couldn't go any place because Yale didn't want them. Harvard. Princeton. Those schools didn't want them.

I could see in him everything that I wanted to be. He was an artist. He was articulate. He was a scholar and he was a gentleman. I mean, he could entertain and hold forth in the best of company. I saw that as the person I wanted to be. He came into the classroom one day and I was painting. And I thought I was doing pretty good, and he complimented me. And he said “You have talent and art and as a painter,” he said. “But you have a good mind.” And he said “You have got to help carry on the tradition that I'm in.” He said “You got to help define the field.” And at that time we were calling it Negro art”, and he said “You know I won’t be here forever.” He said “We'll have to pass the mantle on to somebody.” And he said “You have the capacity, you have the mind.”  so it was that kind of confidence, you know. I just knew I was his favorite student. Even though Lois Jones would say in public, she said, “This is my pet student”. So everybody was aiming to be closer to the teacher you know. And Lois would encourage us by, in a way, kind of treating us like we were already artists. She would take us downtown and we'd be painting in the streets pretending we were in Paris, painting that she did and so forth. So she was a little more indulgent. But Professor Porter was strict, to the point, but accepting in the sense that you knew you had to achieve to be there.

I think most importantly, I felt anointed. I felt that I was the chosen one. I would entertain my fellow colleagues by standing up, giving a lecture without notes the way he did. I would try and dress like him. He was always immaculate you know. He dressed almost like he had English suits and always the right little objects to go along with everything. So, when I returned to Howard, Professor Porter said to me he said “You must have known the day you left Howard that you would be coming back. He said “Because you're ready, you're prepared.” And that was my dream to go to Howard and teach. And so I was still kind of walking in his shadow, in his footsteps. And how Howard had a rather large art department in those days. This is in the 60s I came in 1962. So in1963, when he decided to take a year's  leave to go to Africa on a Ford Foundation Grant of all the people on the faculty, he chose me to be the acting chair in his absence. In those days no such thing as the search committee. I mean whoever was in charge designated. So Lois Jones James Wells Llia Asher all these people, I was the one that he literally handpicked to take his place. so I kind of imprinted myself at Howard organizing exhibitions, bringing in visiting speakers. So I remained there for 4 years.

 I feel like I'm just a a grain of sand on the beach. There's so many other important parts of it. But in certain ways, it is important that I be there, that I continue as my mentor James Porter said, to paint. But he always felt that the two could go together. I could be an artist, but I could also be a scholar. I could be one who helped define things. So that's been a part of the mission of what I felt that I could and should do.

Lou Stovall

 in when winter of 1962, January, I came and entered Howard University as a freshman because I hadn't completed my a whole freshman year at the Rhode Island School of Design and suddenly was involved, totally involved, in the poster making for the protest because I've been doing posters all through high school and uh various church and social groups that my mother belonged to. James Wells as my printmaking teacher probably had the most direct influence on my attitudes of being an artist and a print maker because we talk about that. You know he allowed me to make my prints in the sign shop where I worked and I would bring them in and he would critique them there. And I was as a teaching assistant. But at the same time, we would talk about what it's like to make prints for other people, because some of the students were always after me to “Well can you do this with my print?” “You did that with yours. Can you do that with mine?” and so on. And he was my hero because he understood about art and philosophy and you know  the stories and also the passion to make art.

But intellectually, James Porter was my guy. David Drisckelll had a wonderful relationship and friendship with James Herring and had brought several of the senior students to Herring where they had a wonderful little exhibition there, which  actually I was given the opportunity to curate that exhibition.  I matted and framed and hung every, you know, and so on, because David was one of those people who said “Well you know if you want to do this you don't have to be a senior or you know or junior.” You know I was a sophomore. “To do this. You know you know more about it than anyone else, so you do it.” David Driskell was also the person when we were teaching, he was teaching a class in methods and materials he says “Well Stovall you seem to know uh much about or maybe more about uh methods and materials as I do. Why don't you teach the class and I'll add to it?”

 His spirit and his generosity was the same as that of Porter and of Wells. So that was that was the community around you know around Howard University and around Washington that was going on. So it was not only was it the physical nature of making pains and making art and writing papers and all that, but there was this intellectual component going on that kind of fueled our imaginations. And so Porter just insisted that everyone be as intellectual as possible about everything. You know uh you know he would correct our English and insist that papers be written with proper grammar and that kind of thing. It was wonderful to receive that kind of education.

Topper Carew:

Fall 1961 got to Howard and I joined Student Chapter the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, man. You scout around you Stokely (Carmichael), (H.) Rap (Brown). At Howard on a campus of 10...11,000. It's probably 25 of us if that many, man. But we became the you know thought center of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was (Dr. Martin Luther) King's Youth Organization founded by Ella Baker,

So story goes on, and it caused me to see how I could engage myself in architecture in a different way. So I decided I want to be a people's architect, and I really got fueled after I went to Mississippi. The Institute for Policy Studies which was a think tank, which still exists, had taken a peek at me. “Come by and talk to us” “We'll support you because you are beginning to think about how to practice architecture in a disruptive way.” So, I got myself a little storefront on Florida Avenue for 85 bucks a month.

And I now set up my little shop I'm wearing coveralls and hair and beard blah, blah, blah, talking “Black power”. And kids are peeking in, man. They're like “Who is this dude? what's this all about?” Right? So I figured out a way to flip the space so I could teach art to the kids, but also have that be my base. That kind of energy caused me, along with work ethic, to see new and interesting ways to build this thing called The New Thing, which ended up being an old church an old laundromat, an old ballroom, an old furniture store, two old brownstones.

Photography, graphics, African dance, African percussion. It grew into a jazz concert every week, a blues festival at Howard. It really started out as me just trying to figure out how to encourage the democratization of architecture and planning into this thing where I've got attached to all these kids and was trying to build and create these experiences and platforms for them where in fact art could help them begin to connect to a conscious experience that was Afrocentric so that they could feel stronger, smarter, competent, celebrated, feel like they had some kind of historical lineage, and they just didn't get off the boat with slavery.

So I was very consciously and conscientiously uh working to make create consciousness but it do it in a very artful way you know so you know? We never we never lowered the bar on the art because we were winning gold medals, and design winning film festivals. It just it was very interesting. It was a…it was an energy that created itself that I did not anticipate.

Melvin Deal:

We went to New Thing Art and Architecture Center, which was Topper Carew. And I received my first grant in 1968 to do a summer youth in program through the Mayor's Performing Arts Committee, which is the forerunner of the DC Commission on the Art and Humanities. And what happened was the city put up some money for summer programs, they wanted to give all the money to the European areas of the city. And the Blacks were going to get nothing. So we did a sit-in in June of ‘68 right after Dr King's demise. And we protested and we just generally created confusion at the District Building. So, they relented and they said “Okay write us a one paragraph proposal on a napkin and give it to us and we will give you money for the summer program”.

So that's how I got my first grant. It was me and Topper Carew and James Speight and a number of other people. The fact was, the zeal and the desire to serve our people with the culture kept us going. So when the summer ended in '68 Topper Carew approached me and said, “Would you come to New Thing and be our resident Dance artist at New Thing?” and I went to New Thing in the fall of ’68.

Sondra Hassan:

At Howard I knew Melvin Deal now he because he worked at the library that I used to go to in my neighborhood. And he encouraged me to join his group of African heritage dancers and drummers, which I did. The New Thing then asked me if I would teach dance for the New Thing Art and Architecture Center. They eventually were able to get Melvin Deal, my teacher, to come and teach the dance class. And Melvin and I taught together for a while. It's hard to describe the buzz around the New Thing. I mean, there was just stuff happening, kids doing photography, kids doing printing, kids doing dancing. Of course we had Lou Stoval and Lloyd McNeill doing printing. My mom used to call me Miss New Thing because she realized how much I was into it, how you know how deeply I was affected by how I saw it change people. You know kids who could have been running around, I don't know, doing what but probably some unhealthy things were deeply involved in the New Thing.

Vernon Suggs:

One day I was up which is now Adams Morgan, I was up 18th Street and I think I was about 9 or 10 years old, just wandering in neighborhood and I saw the New Thing. I saw Melvin and them. They were just beginning a workshop in what was an old laundrymat, used to be where Marie H Reed is now, right on the corner of Kalorama Road and 18, right there. That's where the studio used to be. And I'm walking by and I hear the drums, and I peep in the window. And Dino, which was one of the male dancers, the lead dancers, he came out said “What you peeping in here for? Come on in here.” That's how we got integrated into the New Thing and the rest is basically history, because I spent a great deal of my lifetime in that studio. I wouldn't miss it for nothing in the world. I mean I used to go to bed and dream about going back the next day. It really kept me out of trouble.

Perry Suggs:

To me it was a safe haven. It was an outlet to be creative with some of the energy that I had getting in trouble with. You know uh because before I was introduced to the New Thing, I had a lot of time on my hands and nothing to do with it.And I start hanging out with friends and we were getting into mischief. So yeah once I was introduced to the New Thing, it was a place for me to go. And my earliest memory of it is the drumming and dancing. I did start beating on the drums and playing the drums at first, and then they made me sit and listen and watch everybody else. And at the same time there was somebody teaching me different things about the drum, how the drum is made in Africa, how hitting it in a certain spot makes different sounds, and how to combine the sounds to form a rhythm. In the beginning I was like what is this for? And then as time went on and I understood the drum and the music more, then it started to grab my heart. Eventually we ended up going  through a whole scheduled day of learning, whether it was photography, creative writing or dancing and drumming. Trust me. It has had a major impact on my life.

Perry Suggs:

 I'm a musician now and I play in several bands. Had it not been be because of The New Thing and my and my roots in African drumming, I would have never thought of playing any drums. So I mean as a I'm not a star, but I am a person that's striving as a musician because of that.

Vernon Suggs:

If you went there and you got involved, your life was going to forever be changed.Every skill everything I was exposed to in that program, still today years later 50 something years later I still reflect on that stuff and I used it every day. I really can say that you know from the bottom of my heart. It just transformed who I could have been.

Khalil Abdullah:

So what you see is this constant metamorphosis of people who were changing, you know morphing and changing, but with a history that often is unappreciated. Like this person didn't emerge out of a vacuum. This person emerged out of this crosscurrent of interactions. In my youth I really wanted when I'm very young I wanted to be an artist. Even though I didn't do graphics, you know I would stand over Eric Marlowe who was like pure genius with the pen.

Percy Martin. Michael Platt. Those kinds of interactions and those kinds of things are not captured in programs so to speak. So that's why I'm saying for me the while the programs were important, what was even greater, if you will, was the opportunity to meet minds that were also searching for their own directions. So you never know, you know many times the life you're leading, the paths, you cross who people are, you know what they're really about. And so it's very difficult for me to quantify the impact that New Thing had. Did the film crew that trained to New Thing go on and make movies?  have no idea but you can bet their lives would change as a consequence. So just because one doesn't pursue the specific skill set doesn't mean that one isn't affected in other ways about how they see the world. Okay, so I didn't become a photographer okay but I look at the world a little differently because I you know because I went through that experience.

Peggy Cooper Cafrtiz

We started something at GW called the  Black Students Union. It's now called the

Black People's Union but um during um the course of that I wasn't the president of that but I became the chairman of a Black Cultural Weekend that we did under the banner of the Black Students Union. And in the course of putting on that weekend it was really my first real foray into the city, deep into the city, and I got to know a lot of people and we brought lots of people to campus. And we also brought a lot of kids to campus. And I was talking to someone I had met during that weekend, Mike Malone, who was a graduate student at the time at Georgetown, working on his Master’s in French. And we were standing around talking and ”I said you know I've seen so many talented kids in DC since I've been working on this and it's terrible that they don't have anywhere to go and their talents so raw and unpolished” and he said “Why don't you start a school?”

I actually wrote a three-page proposal shortly thereafter which is kind the thought is kind of laughable now. And I took it to Lloyd Elliot, who was then the president of GW, and whom I had come to know quite well, because he kept strong relationships with a few of us wanting to assure that we didn't burn his campus down or something. And you know and I said “President Elliot I've got this great idea. Would you be willing to give us space and give us money, etc.?’ He agreed that I could do it. and that summer. I raised money I raised quite a bit of money for my age having no idea what I was doing. And by the end of the summer we had 90 students. And it was called Workshops for Careers in the Arts. Then I started realizing I'm raising over a million dollars a year. Now this is not going to continue to happen and so I started lobbying the school system to give us a building and to designate us as a public school. And in 1974  we opened as the Duke Ellington School of the Arts at our present location at 3500 R Street. And we took over what had been a DC Public School.

Carol Foster:

Sometimes you find perfect pairings, and Peggy was that. She was the Machinery. She was a mechanism for the vision. Mike was the artistic visionary. You know, he knew what he wanted. He knew what he could pull out of people, and he knew what it would take to make students better artists. And Peggy believed in his vision and followed that ,and she made it possible with her connects and her aggressiveness to make that school happen. She was really the oil to this engine. They were passionate about what they wanted to do. They were committed and they were activist to make it happen.

Jarvis Grant:

Peggy was the… I'll say she was the political powerhouse. And Mike Malone was the insightful crafts person. You know he knew about production. He knew all of that. She knew it too, but he was more intimately involved with that kind of thing and what students, what professionals need to know. I'm not even going to say. He understood what the professional attitude had to be. And so his thing was choosing people who could

give that attitude to those kids.

And we're talking about people like Percy Martin, Michael Platt, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Winnie Owens, Ed Love, Bill Harris. And then you have people who were from that first wave of what it meant to be a real artist like Lillian Burwell. You had these people having an opportunity to go beyond whatever the DCPS curriculum was in terms of what students are supposed to give from art. That art was just as important as English.

Davey Yarborough

Ellington has been that mission of Peggy Cafrtiz and Mike Malone, of young folks who would not have otherwise would not have an opportunity to excel in the arts. Its whole concept, this whole mission was about bringing the arts and understanding the wealth of talent that was here in the city. And everybody couldn't you know, didn't have access.

Yvette Heyliger:

When the art school opened up we were like “Oh let's audition for the art school” you know? And my twin sister wanted to be a dancer at the time, and I wanted to be a dancer too. And she was like “No, no, you go do your thing. Go do theater.” So I auditioned for the theater department, my younger sister and I. So my twin was in dance and my younger sister and I were in the theater department. Glenda Dickerson who was the head of the theater department at that time. It was so exciting because what Glenda gave us was our very own Black selves. She instilled in us pride in who we are and what we offer. and she often would call on the ancestors you know to inspire and protect us. And so it was a real  education. And I say that my education was revolutionary, because Glenda was not having it with white theater traditions. And she introduced us to nonlinear forms, ritualistic forms of theater, devised theater. There was something called The Living Library, where we would perform po poetry uh by Langston Hughes, etc. All the great poets and so it was different for me to be exposed to such revolutionary ideas.

Francesca Scott:

I think a common thread was we were all treated a little differently at our other schools because we either looked different or we were doing something different. But bottom line is that we all share this love of art or music or dance or theater. And I think that that was the common commonality amongst us, that even though someone was in theater or dance, I was in Visual Arts, we could still understand what was going on, and we could accept what was going on, and respect what they were doing even though we I couldn't dance or that kind of thing.

 Jarvis Grant he made you really dig deep into the photograph. “Oh this doesn't look too good. You know? “You need to do better.” And you're like “Really?” And he's still like that. But he made me really appreciate the medium. And in fact we had two photography teachers, Margaret Stevenson or Margaret Paris Stevenson, as well as Jarvis Grant. And he really made to this day, I attribute some of the things that I appreciate about photography or understand about photography because of him, and also because of Margaret Stevenson. But Jarvis made sure that if you didn't do it right the first time, he wanted you to get it right. And we may not have liked that back then, or we would kind of say, “Oh I don't understand why.  I've worked on this so hard.” But he knew he knew what he wanted us to see, and to this day. I still think about that.

Jarvis Grant:

That was amazing, you know, to instill that into these kids who are now. I see some of them now and they're 60 years old and stuff, and they're still… They’re doing their art and stuff like that. It was like, you know you planted a seed. That they knew definitely they're going to art school and they're going to do this and they're going to do that. They saw themselves as artists in the future.

Carol Foster:

The time was right the time. There were kids who were super, super, super dedicated and wanted the arts. They were hungry. So, that was another piece that made it really, really flourish. And being able to take kids out of Southeast, where most of the talent happened to be, taking them from there to that kind of environment in Georgetown. Life-changing. Absolutely life-changing.

Yvette Heyliger:

This blending of scholar and artist coming together, in my experience at the school, sort of followed me throughout the rest of my life. You know later when I became a playwright, then suddenly, all the writing and research that goes into to writing plays, came together with the artistic act of writing. And so it sort of really laid the foundation for what would become my artistic Journey throughout my life.

Hank Willis Thomas:

I was in the Museum studies department and I learned everything I know about critical thinking in that department. I learned about what it meant to be a young artist, what it meant to be a young African-American artist, and the importance of using our voices to inspire change for the better in our society. And that's something that I carry with me today, as well as a lot of Duke Ellington alumni that I speak with, work with on a daily basis.

Francesca Scott:

I tell students now, “You'll thank me later.” “You may not understand why you have to have this or why I'm giving you this now.”  But eventually it kind of you have that “Aha!” moment where you're like, “Wow this is why he was on me.” “This is why Percy Martin was on me about being able to composition and color.” “All the things that go along with basic, basic two-dimensional design.” The same thing with Bill Harris, being in his class and being frustrated, but he knew why you were frustrated, and he was trying to get to through to you, just like Lillian Burwell or Jarvis Grant. You didn't understand until actually you were in your senior year, and you left. And then as a professional, you totally respect the fact that they were on you like that.

I don't think of Ellington as a job. I think of it as something I need to do to pass it forward. And because I do it every day, or often it's a challenge to put it into an assignment form, but to be able to see students take work and say, “We got this,” and they hang it, they do all the everything that's involved with putting an exhibition together, makes me proud that I can see them do this and uh that there are still students that want to do this. And when they go off to their internships or they say “I want to apply to the same school you went to,” you know and then they get accepted, make a phone call and say, “Look I got a student that's on their way up.” It's full circle. It’s full circle for me. And to think that 50 years later, 49 years later, because I'm in that second class, that this school is still living up to Mike Malone and Peggy Cooper's dream.