July 14th 2020:  This is the start of my 2nd week in Residency. I am aware of the shift in my practice. I started training preparations for this short....three-month long honor in late December 2019 when Allison told me to expect it.  Before I had a contract.  Before I got any of the detailed calls to plan terms and review resources. Before Covid spreaded dread.  This prep-work concept was derived from my years coaching Basketball and Volleyball.  Knowing the "season" is limited and the best results flow from momentum.  Pace and rigor in planned activities to escalate skills and awareness so that I would be ready on  day one of the Residency.  Not showing up in a creative fog...burdened with underutilized skills.  Nope! That would not do.  I planned to be on fiya!!!

Above is a finished Rhythmistic Quilt. I actually did the image in about 30 minutes back in around 1988.  Back then my life and art were blended at a high level over years.  I was a major market freelance illustrator and Rhythmistic theorist.  I taught air-brush on textiles at the Textile Arts Center. Plus the director of a Fine Art Center located in the heart of the largest most notorious Public Housing Projects in the USA.  The Robert Taylor Housing Development.     I was on fiya!

 This was before I became a Chicago Public Schools educator and had to reduce my Rhythmistic practices in order to best service my students and teams plus succeed in the negative dysfunctional system and poor management styles that made CPS very dangerous and unwelcoming to heterosexual Black Male educators. ( Notice research shows there are very few Black Male public school educators.)  But now seven years retired from that system.....I can recover the highest levels of my Rhythmistic Practices.  This Residency is a seriously welcomed boost in my vintage stage of practices.

Small ink sketch

 Now these four works are planned with various sketches.  Looked over using each of my multiple personalities along with the rare insights of outsiders.  I tend not to ask for others' insights because they tend to not send enough meaningful time or attention with my practices...art works....or this side of me.  Or they default to personal taste saying "I like this" I do not like that".  Folks mostly  talk entertainment and news clip recaps....not Visual Art or future-primitif processes.

The four panels. Each on cotton, sized 60 inches by 50 inches will representing Visual Art, Music, Performing Art and Literature.  I will have moved the needle from African icons to the First Peoples / Native American playful Kokopelli with a little re-contextualization thrown in.  Not being linear anthropologically here.  But Rhythmistically expressive...

Of course this will again make it more unlikely that folks into "Black Art" or mainstream Visual art will know what to make of me and my works. ( Over the years I have been called "Too Black" in Black Art Circles" or not Black because my works tends not be a tribute to suffering or a celebration of oppression but is intelligently processed.

And many mainstream gallerists have said...."How dare you decide to name a genre?"!

In 1975 a major art rep told me: "Turtel your work is too creative for us and your own people will never support you! What are you gonna do?  Well a lot has happened since then. Seems history tells us that my late amazing innovative brilliant soul brother artist, Vincent Van Gogh, had moments like that too.....

PRODUCTION : 1. Prep the fabrics. 2.  Plot out and compose the image in graphite.  3. Complete its embellishment in air-brush.  4. Then later pass them all onward to my fave quilter.. Patrick Whalen for his yet to be determined by him finishing treatment. 5. Secure musical and sonic compositions to facilitate the experience for the witnessing and participating future audiences and interested art lovers or curators.