A Nuyorican Artist Whose Art Is "Evolving In All Different Areas"

The following unpublished interview with the artist Armando Alleyne (born in 1959) was done in 1984.

Over a cup each of unsweetened peppermint tea, Armando Alleyne, an Afro-Latino artist, and I sat facing each other in his tiny studio apartment on Convent Avenue in Harlem. We discussed his work, travels, and ideas. On the walls were paintings and wood sculptures he had exhibited at two local art shows.

Alleyne also created three paintings for inclusion in the art collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library system. "They're from the Cloud Series," he explained. "It is a series that deals with the sky and how it changes. They are abstract representations of the sky that would have other things blended into them." For example, continued Alleyne, one painting is "also a collage. There are stamp images of Martin Luther King stamped onto the sky. There are flowers and sometimes colors."

His gay artwork has appeared in the first and second issues of Blackheart, a black gay literary and graphic arts magazine, and in the New York Native, the gay weekly newspaper. In the summer of 1977, Fag Rag, published his poem, "Cute." Those publications no longer exist.

                                                Portrait of Nina Simone by Armando Alleyne (The Jazz Series).

                                                 

Alleyne, a graduate of the City College of New York, where he majored in painting, is of Puerto Rican/Barbadian heritage and is one of eleven children.

[Today, forty plus years later, Alleyne has received much recognition from the New York art world and has published A Few of My Favorites, a collection of artwork, photos, and poetry. The book was published in 2021 by the Swiss publisher, Edition Patrick Frey. Full disclosure: I was the book's proofreader.]

I asked him during the interview about his travels to other countries.

Armando Alleyne: I'm thinking of going to Mexico in January [1985] for a month or two to take some more lessons in ceramics. When I was in Africa, I was given a chance to study all these different wood sculptures. In Senegal I saw a lot of different wood carvings. I also went to Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania.

Charles Michael Smith: Did you feel connected to Africa in any way?

AA: Africa, I feel, has given me a more international scope of  black people, to see Africans, first of all. It showed me there's always space for learning new things about different people and different cultures. I enjoyed it.

Militarily, over there, around certain army bases, governmental buildings, they get very touchy. They don't want you to take pictures of the governmental areas, like the capital buildings, the palace where the president of the country lives. They figured you might try to do a bomb plot and that's what you might use the pictures for. The same rule is also true in Guinea-Bissau. I can understand that. That's how they feel. I still enjoyed myself. I took pictures of a lot of things. I took pictures of the churches and of different people, fishing and farming.  They basically lived off the land, either fishing or growing rice and plantains.

CMS: Where have you exhibited your work?

AA: I have already exhibited works from the Expectation Series at the Rainbow Studio Collective Anniversary Party art exhibit [June 16, 1984] and at the World Hispanic Fair [New York Coliseum, August 3, 4, and 5, 1984]. The exhibit had pieces from the Warrior Series and pieces from the Ancestral Series at that fair. It was a wonderful fair. There were 13, 14 artists altogether. They all had a sign saying the country that they were from. I had a sign saying "Nuyorican." I was going to put "Barbados" [on it] but they got into such a racket because they were saying Barbados is a British colony and "We don't want no British colony," quote unquote, "there." It doesn't matter to me. British or Spanish, it's the same colonial system.

CMS: The New York art world has, as you probably know, many gay artists in it.

AA: Yeah. I see myself as evolving in all different areas. I don't see necessarily the point of art only being placed in one particular area. I try to exhibit my art in whatever different areas I can. This is important because in a place like New York City, there are so many different audiences you can respond to and reach with your art.

The World Hispanic Fair was an excellent opportunity for me to share my work with other Latin artists as well as getting an aspect of all the different Latin countries performing and doing their thing and showing all the Indian-ness in their culture and the African-ness and the European-ness mixed into that culture.

Different people would come over. Some people would give donations because they were impressed. Other people would ask me questions like "Where did you learn your skills?," "How long did you study your art?" Some people there were saying that my work was very strong, really strong enough to continue doing what I was doing.

CMS: What are your future plans?

AA: What I want to do is make my own designs using stencil for sweatshirts and sell them in the fall. I really feel I could make a lot of money doing that. I have all the equipment ready for it. I have the dyes ready. It's the type of dye that when you put it on cotton, and once the picture is dry, you just have to iron it and it's permanent. Within the next three years I see myself doing sculptures for buildings, doing murals for buildings and corporations and family home units while still working on my prints and ceramic work. And all the time doing paintings, at home or in the studio. I visualize myself as having a house. Moving from a loft space to a house.

A Small African Boy's Creativity And Determination

Galimoto by Karen Lynn Williams, illustrated by Catherine Stock (HarperCollins, paperback, 1991, approx. 32 pp.,  suitable for ages 4-8).

Kondi is a small boy who lives in a village in the African country of Malawi where the national language is Chichewa.

"I shall make a galimoto," he tells his older brother, Ufulu. (Galimoto, the Chichewa word for "car," is what a small push toy is called. It can be made of wires or some other material.) Ufulu laughs and tells Kondi that he doesn't have enough wires to make his toy. That sets Kondi on a neighborhood search for wires. Along the way he encounters adults who at first don't understand what he is doing when he climbs over a fence or innocently cuts in front of  a long line of housewives patiently waiting to have their maize ground by the miller at the flour mill.

Undeterred, Kondi continues his search for more wires. When he achieves his goal, Kondi makes a toy car that he pushes with a long bamboo stick to the delight of the other children in the village. After succeeding in making his galimoto, he dreams that night of what he will make next. Perhaps "an ambulance or an airplane or a helicopter."

Galimoto is a riveting story that is told in simple language and is beautifully illustrated with watercolor drawings. The book is meant to be read aloud and is sure to please children in the four to eight age range.

The story took me back to my own childhood when I would make a bus or a train out of an empty quart size milk container or cardboard boxes. I had plenty of store-bought toys but I also enjoyed making things by hand.

Galimoto is a great way for parents to encourage small children to let their imaginations have free rein by using everyday items to create their own toys and not depend solely on those that are ready-made.

At a time when kids have their eyes glued to mobile devices, this book introduces them to the printed page, shows them the simple pleasure of creating something with their own hands, and allows them to see how a child in a far-away land uses his leisure time.

The "Black Panther" Movie Is Awesome!

Last night, I saw the movie Black Panther--twice! I attended the 8 o'clock show and hung around to see the 11 o'clock show. (When I left the theatre, it was a quarter to two in the morning.) I wanted to see what all the adulation was about. It's an awesome movie! I hope to discuss it soon on the blog. It's worthy of a long, thoughtful essay.

Books By Authors From Countries Disparaged By Trump

As a response to President Trump's recent labeling of Haiti and African nations  as "shithole countries," Book Culture, a book store on 112th Street near Broadway in Manhattan, created a window display featuring twenty-eight books from some of the countries disparaged by Trump.

On one of the windows was posted a message, printed in all capital letters, that said:
"WE HAPPILY SELL BOOKS BY AUTHORS FROM 'S***HOLE COUNTRIES.'"

Some of the books and authors in the window display included In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah, Homecoming: A Novel by Yaa Gyasi, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf by Helene Cooper, and A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa by Alexis Okeowo.

A Nigerian Short Story Heard On The Radio

I heard the Nigerian writer Teju Cole's short story, "Modern Girls," read on public radio's Selected Shorts via New York's WNYC on September 13, 2015. It is set in a school for girls in Nigeria during the early 1970s, around the time of the Biafran war. The quality of Cole's writing is so good that I want to read the story myself  as well as his other work, both fiction and nonfiction.

Somali Food Comes To Harlem

A new Somali restaurant recently opened in Harlem. Safari, which is family-owned, is the only Somali restaurant in New York City, according to Adam, its manager.

I am looking forward to doing a feature story about it for this blog.

Nobelist Wole Soyinka's Prostate Cancer Cure?

The banner headline on the front page of the African Sun Times (December 1-7, 2014) announced: "Soyinka: How I Survived Prostate Cancer." Wanting to know how Nigerian playwright/poet/essayist Wole Soyinka achieved this medical miracle, I immediately went to the story, which reported on remarks he made  at a press conference in his hometown of Abeokuta, Nigeria.

According to the article, Soyinka, a 1986 Nobel laureate in literature, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December of 2013. (Soyinka a few paragraphs later stated it was in November.) He claimed he was cured in October of 2014. But the article neglected to give specifics about Soyinka's treatment other than to quote the 80-year-old luminary as saying "There are many ways of managing cancer; even diet. I have had to drink a lot of water and as many of you know, water and I are not really friends."

He went on to state that "It [prostate cancer] is not a death sentence and it is curable. I have undergone the treatment."

If Soyinka, a brilliant and articulate man, went to the trouble of giving a press conference about his prostate cancer cure, he must have given the attendees more information about his treatment options than was reported in the article. The African Sun Times, published in East Orange, New Jersey, has unfortunately done its readers a disservice by publishing what can only be called shoddy and incomplete journalism.

An African Immigrant's Story Found On The Street

I found among two boxes of discarded books on upper Broadway near 113th Street in the Columbia University area, a paperback copy of Strength in What Remains by journalist Tracy Kidder (Random House, 2009). The book, in excellent condition, was probably discarded by one of the book vendors seen at various locations up and down the street every day. Written on one of the inside pages, in pencil, is the number "5." No doubt the price that a vendor sought.

Reading the back jacket copy, I learned that this nonfiction book is about a young man from the tiny East African country of Burundi who "lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts." He ends up "in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing."

This is the kind of immigrant story that would appeal to President Barack Obama as an example of America's open-arm embrace of those seeking freedom and prosperity in a new land. I'm looking forward to settling down with this book called by one critic "a tour de force. Inspiring. Moving. Gripping."

After reading it, I will probably review it for this blog. So please stay tuned.

Tribute To A Fallen Hero

My condolences to the family of activist/Pan-Africanist Elombe Brath, who died Monday, May 19, in New York at age 77. It's fitting that he died on what would have been Malcolm X's 89th birthday.

Beautiful African Men

Anyone who doubts the beauty of the African male should check out the YouTube video  Beautiful African Men which is a series of still photos of men from various African countries (Ghana, Congo, Nigeria, etc.). The photo gallery is set to an uptempo soundtrack. The only celebrities whose names I recognize are actors Boris Kodjoe and Idris Elba. But, famous or not, all the men are worthy of a look. Black is indeed beautiful.

Comic Books That Are Aimed At Adults

Do you still think of comic books as kid stuff? Well, the people at Marvel Comics, the home of such superheroes as The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man, want to change your mind.

In an effort to reach a more mature audience, Marvel Comics has initiated, under its Epic imprint, the Tales From the Heart of Africa series. The first book, The Temporary Natives, focuses on Cathy Grant, a young white Peace Corps volunteer assigned to a village in the Central African Republic. The story is loosely based on the real-life experiences of Peace Corps retiree Cindy Goff (who co-authored with Rafael Nieves.

The Temporary Natives, in an often cinematically-inspired art style (by black Chicago artist Seitu Hayden), traces Cathy's odyssey from her graduation day at the University of Minnesota to her first year in the Peace Corps. We witness her day-to-day interactions with the local people and their customs. We also witness Carthy's role as a mediator when the local people become alienated by the condescension of Jack Glaser, a Corps colleague, during the building of a schoolhouse.

"This book," said 26-year-old Marcus McLaurin , Marvel Comic's only black editor, "can be more broadly interpreted as the Peace Corps in a lot of the underdeveloped countries, and the kind of culture shock that some of the volunteers run into and in general the feeling of hopelessness which tend to pervade a lot of the work. They've come to devote two years of their lives to do something good and yet they come away with questions of whether they did more harm than good."

The next book, continued McLaurin, himself an illustrator (he drew a comic book aimed at teens for the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force), "will be more about the country at the time [the mid-'80s] and the politics of the region, such as a massacre of local college students which really didn't get a lot of press coverage. It was a relatively minor protest which was met with excessive force."

McLautin believes The Temporary Natives's bookshelf format--quality paper between book-size softcovers--is the appropriate way to present this form of comic book storytelling because "you can tell longer stories, you can do interesting things with color, and a lot of people can afford it, adults as well as younger people."

Although the series is primarily  "seeking a mature audience," observed McLaurin, it is "applicable to any age group. Too often comics talk down to kids. If you present something to them in a mature manner and with thoughtfulness, it [the subject matter] becomes accessible to them."

With The Temporary Natives, McLaurin went on, "[w]e really show how powerful and versatile the comic medium is."

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (August 25, 1990).

African Influence In The Americas

Since its inception in 1976, the Caribbean Cultural Center in Manhattan, along with numerous other black institutions, has been continuing the battle against the centuries-old myth that blacks have had nothing of value culturally or intellectually to offer the New World. The center has been doing this by researching and identifying African continuities and retentions, and showing their impact on general society.

The center, the brainchild of Marta Moreno Vega, a New York-born Puerto Rican and its executive director, grew out of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship she received in 1975 to find out about various art collections that had been properly identified, as well as find out their location. At that time, Ms. Vega, a former art education teacher in the New York City public school system, was director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem and needed the information in order for the art objects to "make any sense."

She had no intention of starting an institution when she got the first of two six-month fellowships. But her difficulties in tracking down and identifying collections made it clear that a center was needed to make these publicly inaccessible artworks available for scholarly examination. It became necessary for her to travel throughout the Caribbean and Bahia, Brazil to see what other institutions were doing so that she could decide what she would do differently. She learned that local institutions focused only on the history and culture of their particular geographic area and that "[n]one of them brought the cultures together and explored their relationship and commonalities and their differences."

It became apparent to Ms. Vega that such a center would be a unique cultural treasure chest to scholars and laymen alike. As it turned out, scholars and researchers were very receptive to the idea because, she said, they "felt there had to be some kind of institutional vehicle that would bring this information to the foreground."

When she was asked how strong the African influence in the Americas has been, Ms. Vega replied: "It's pervasive. You see it in terms of instruments in orchestras, in terms of clothing style, in terms of foods. The Afro-American community is clearly becoming the majority culture. When you have a majority culture, you  have food, clothes, art forms that are expressive of [that] culture. We have to be very clear that the influence and impact is there." Although the African cultural influence in the Americas is "very much intact," she continued, "the media doesn't focus on it and when [the media] does [they present this influence as coming from] primitive cultures. And derogatory terms makes us turn away [from that influence] or say it's not there."

The Caribbean Cultural Center, newly located in a narrow, four-story building near St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side of Manhattan receives about 60 to 65 people a day. The support and attendance from the black community, said Ms. Vega, "has been very good. We get increasingly more pleased, more committed to what we're doing because the audience represents black people from all cultures."

The center plans to have an enclosed tropical garden in the backyard so that children can see the various kinds of "plants and vegetation that grows in the Caribbean." Also planned is the completion of fourth-floor remodeling work. This is where all audio-visual documentation of center activities will be made accessible to students and researchers.

When storage space for the audio-visual materials runs out, the center will donate to the New York Public Library's Schomburg Collection or some other library those materials no longer needed.

According to Ms. Vega, the center has developed a five-year plan and is "looking for those kinds of activities and art forms that [will] fit into the development of that plan," a sort of blueprint detailing the center's direction and aesthetic definition. She pointed out that in the search for "the broader impact of African cultures in the Americas," they would like to "move into Panama and Colombia and other areas where black continuities are."

This article was originally published in the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.

Note: The Caribbean Cultural Center, in 2012 or 2013, plans to leave its 58th Street location and move to its new home, an abandoned firehouse on 125th Street in East Harlem, just steps from the Metro North and Lexington Avenue train stations.

A Triple Heritage

The Voice of the People
New York Daily News
220 East 42nd Street
New York, NY 10017

December 7, 1992

Dear Editor:

Voicer Nick Arroyo (December 5, 1991) believes blacks from the Caribbean islands, who now live in Crown Heights [Brooklyn], should not be called African-Americans, but Caribbean-Americans. What he forgets is that their ancestral home is Africa, too. They should be called instead, however unwieldy on the tongue, Afro-Caribbean-Americans. This would remind people of this group's triple heritage.

Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith

This letter was published in the New York Daily News on December 26, 1992.