He generally loves stories. He doesn’t read them but he fantasizes about them when he sees something or hears something. His interest in slavery, especially as it occurred in Suriname with the Maroons, was sparked by the stories his grandmother told him.
“I was captivated by it. It convinced me of the power of limitless, passionate phantasy, of storytelling as a concept and of sadness in combination with liberating humor. It proved the artificiality of the difference between low art and high art and, yes, it showed that Darger has looked over his shoulder.”
The Los Angeles based artist Umar Rashid has a solo exhibition in the Dordrecht Museum in the Netherlands. From October 29 2022 until March 5 2023. A good reason to republish the interview I had with him in 2016.
“(humor) is indicative of my upbringing as a Black male in the United States (or anywhere in the Western psyche for that matter). Casting any light upon the White male hierarchy outside of the accepted canon requires superhuman (albeit tiring) cleverness, deftness, and diplomacy to which other groups are not so subjected. I don’t feel like this all the time but my black survival training always pushes this “behavior” into my frontal lobe. A shameful bi-product of living within the veil of unending racism. Yet, on a different note, I do consider myself to be quite funny.”
