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The following unpublished interview with the artist Armando Alleyne (born in 1959) was done in 1984.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 Phrase Book For Gay Travelers

For gay travelers and language students I recommend The Gay Phrase Book by Barry McKay (Cassell, 1995). The front cover advises the reader to "Get Your Man in Six Different Languages." Those languages, each having its own section, are French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Portuguese. Sprinkled throughout the book are beefcake photos.

On The Road With Langston Hughes And Friend

I enjoy a good road-trip movie like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Thelma & Louise (1991). And for a long time I've seen the movie potential of a road trip by car that Langston Hughes and his traveling companion, Zell Ingram, a young artist, took in 1931. (Ingram is described by the biographer Arnold Rampersad in his The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986) as "a big, handsome, young black man, about twenty-one years old, who lived with his mother over a popular Cleveland hot-dog shop.")

The trip took them from Cleveland to Florida. And from there to Cuba and Haiti; then back to Florida, where they picked up the black civil rights activist and college president Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach. She became Hughes's second traveling companion all the way to New York City.

While Hughes and Ingram were in Cuba and Haiti, they encountered enough adventures and misadventures to make a feature-length movie a riveting cinematic experience.

Sometimes I think I should become a movie producer.

Terror In The Sky

The best book trailer that I've seen is the one for Falling (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), a thriller by T.J. Newman. It's like watching a mini movie.

I first saw it at a Target store in Harlem on their giant screen near the electronics department. I bought the book the same day I saw the trailer. The trailer didn't influence me because I was planning to buy the book anyway.

I knew I wanted to read it when I read an article about the author, a former flight attendant, and her "what if" scenario on Los Angeles magazine's website. "What would a pilot do," asked the article, "if someone took his family hostage and demanded he crash the plane to save them?"

I wanted to find out and so far (at this writing, I am 85 pages from the end), the book is a real roller coaster ride, or maybe I should say, a turbulent ride, living up to the media hype.

I want to finish it before the movie version comes out which will probably be a year or a year and a half from now. It will be interesting to see how close the movie follows the book.

I read the brief review of Falling in the New York Times Book Review (July 18, 2021) in which the reviewer points to the book's "over-the-topness." But that's why people read thrillers in the first place. These books keep the reader on the edge of their seat, biting their fingernails as a result of their "over-the-topness." The movie will probably be more so.

One thing is for sure, Falling is not a book you'd want to read while flying; it's too scary.

Learning Another Word For Jet Lag

While reading Jeanne Mackin's riveting novel, The Last Collection (Berkley, 2019), about the rivalry between Paris couturiers Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel, I learned a new word--desynchronosis, the physical ailment one experiences traveling across time zones via airplane. It's better known as jet lag or jet fatigue.

A Black Heritage T-Shirt

Last week, on the M5 city bus traveling uptown on Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan, I saw a very interesting and unusual sight--a portly, middle-aged white man wearing a black heritage-themed T-shirt. As he stood in the aisle talking to the lady seated next to me and her husband who stood next to her, I was able to jot down what was printed on the shirt:

"Dream Like Martin
 Challenge Like Rosa
 Inspire Like Barack
 Write Like Maya
 Build Like Oprah
 Educate Like W.E.B.
 Fight Like Malcolm
 Believe Like Thurgood
 Speak Like Frederick
 Stand Up Like Colin
 Lead Like Harriet
 Champion Like Ali"

Obviously this was a man with respect for black historical figures and was not shy about showing it.

I have a co-worker at the call center who proudly shows his afrocentricity by wearing T-shirts with photos of such icons as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, and Malcolm X. But I've never seen him wear a T-shirt like the aforementioned one.

I'm not much for wearing logos, slogans, and photos on clothing. But the T-shirt I saw on the bus is worth owning if only to display it as an alternative and a corrective to the profane and narcissistic ones I've seen people wear on the streets of Harlem and elsewhere.

Putting LGBT Harlem On The Map

The Sunday New York Times's Travel section for June 1, 2014 devoted several pages to LGBT travel. The one bit of information that especially caught my attention was that Fun Maps, a Maplewood, New Jersey-based company, was planning to publish a Harlem map, pinpointing all of the community's gay venues. As a longtime Harlem resident, I was delighted to learn about Fun Map's plan. The map would be similar to the company's other gay-oriented maps that focused on cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Toronto. Fun Map's slogan on its maps was "30 years mapping the gay and lesbian world." The Harlem map was scheduled for publication in the summer of 2014.

Not long after, the Fun Maps of various cities were no longer available at the places where I would pick them up--the Gay Community Center in Greenwich Village, Les Hommes bookstore on the Upper West Side of  Manhattan, and the Suite, a bar also on the Upper West Side.

I learned later, via the Internet, that Fun Maps was no longer in business. The phone number printed on the maps was out of service.

It's too bad that Fun Maps didn't do the Harlem map before its demise. It would now be a collector's item.

Maybe Harlem Pride,the seven-year-old LGBT organization, would be interested in undertaking such a worthwhile and important project.

Epyllion

(Note in a travel guide: "Here in Naxos, the village, as is true of all the [Greek] islands, is to be found atop the highest mountain peak.")

Why did they come here, here to this barren, unyielding mountain top? The cliffs are so steep. How did they get here? Which leader of which seafaring tribe called out: "Here we shall settle. Disembark. Bring your tools. Climb the mountain after me. Here shall we be safe from pirates from the shore below. Here shall we build our lives and bear our children"?

                                                                 ---Velma Jean Robinson Reeb

Reeb, a former resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, now resides in Portland, Oregon. For a brief time, she and her son lived in Greece.



Merry Christmas to all the readers of this blog!

Visit To Poros

I am beginning to understand the young college woman [my son] Joey and I met in Poros. She has haunted my imagination. She was there and could not leave nor could she (did she wish to) learn the language. She was protected, accepted, and safe. The Porosians gibed her for not making more of an effort to learn Porosian Greek and for wishing to sleep with her door open to relieve the heat at night.

She was a lovely girl and sat all day at the coffee house where George, the proprietor and her boyfriend, picked up some English from her. She said she wanted to return--rather, felt impelled to return--to Connecticut, home and college the next autumn, but for now was content to sit on Poros.

I remember her lovely long black hair, beautiful eyes, and chubby figure. So young, so wise, and perhaps, so weary. She'd come to Poros in the spring--at Easter time when a solitary re-colored egg is given one and all to commemorate grandly the Resurrection, and she had never left.

Two or three ferry boats came by daily; otherwise, nothing happened on Poros, sun and sea eternally. I often wonder if she ever left and how she feels if she did not--and how, if she did. Surely, she came in search of a family, this child from Upper Exurbia, New England, and she found a ready one. But she was silent, except to speak with American and French tourists, only to guide them to rooms or restaurants.

George spoke "hallow" and "Go right on block. Ask for manager." He was proud of his English, very Greek, dark, black-eyed, and lean. He had a not-disgruntled, but rather sinewy, stern quality about him. He disliked and at the same time depended upon the seasonal tourist trade. A young man bred of Poros. Closed-in, trying hard to keep out the world that had found his island, loving by night a lovely dark-haired American girl, keeping her in check by day, at once proud of and a little afraid of this stranger from across the sea, sharing all there is without many words.

                                                                             ---Velma Jean Robinson Reeb

Reeb, a former resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, now resides in Portland, Oregon. For a brief time she and her son Joey lived in Greece.


                                                         
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Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. As you may know, in 1941, Japanese war planes bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking ships and killing and injuring many American sailors. This led to the United States entering World War II.

For The Monk At Amorgos

He is magnificent, this monk, this Greek Orthodox monk in finery, so severe on his horse matching his will and grace and soul, one with him, placing his black-booted foot into a stirrup.

I seem to remember just the gaze of his clear eyes set in a handsome face; you dare not ask to take his photograph; and could you anyway capture such a fierce spirit on a Kodakcolor slide?

Souls cannot be trapped on print of any kind.

                                                         ---Velma Jean Robinson Reeb

Reeb, a former resident of Manhattan's Upper West Side, now resides in Portland, Oregon. For a brief time, she and her son lived in Greece.

Combating Monkey Butt

The first time I became aware of the malady called monkey butt was when it was mentioned in a Duluth Trading Company catalogue that offered a product that went by the name "Anti Monkey Butt Powder."

Monkey butt was described in the catalogue copy as "a term coined by bikers  to refer to soreness, itching and redness from long hours on a bike seat." (Presumably horseback riders, bicyclists, truck drivers, and writers (?) are similarly afflicted.)

The mention of this strangely named condition caused me to think back to the early 1960s when my second oldest brother Richard and his traveling companion nicknamed Lucky (who was also our sister's boyfriend at the time), crossed the country on a motorcycle from New York to Los Angeles, where my mother and I were living.

When Richard and Lucky got to Needles, California, the bike broke down a la the scene in the movie Motorcycle Diaries in which the motorcycles of Che Guevara and his traveling companion break down as they travel the length of South America. Richard asked our mother to wire them some money so they could continue on to L.A. She did and they safely completed the journey.

I now regret not interviewing my brother, who died in 1989, about that three-thousand-mile trek. I wonder what sights and adventures they encountered along the way. I also wonder how they combated the dreaded symptoms of monkey butt.

Reading On The Subway

When I'm reading a book on the subway here in New York and see three or four other riders doing the same thing either with a physical book or an e-book device, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I'm sitting in a reading room on wheels and confirms that reading hasn't completely died out.