♪ ♪ ♪ >> Larry Poncho Brown, renowned visual artist, next on "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

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Supporting the financial health of our diverse customers and employees is one of the many ways we remain invested in inclusion for all today, tomorrow, and in the future.

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♪ ♪ >> We're very pleased to have on "The Chavis Chronicles" one of the most profound visual artists, fine artists in the world today, I just want to say in America.

Welcome, Larry Poncho Brown.

>> Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

>> So, look, man, growing up in Baltimore, how did you first discover your artistic gift?

>> Well, you know, when you grow up in Baltimore, you learn quick what you can do and what you can't do.

And one thing I could do was draw and paint.

I wasn't the most athletic person in the world at that time, but it was something that kept me off the streets, kept me kind of out of trouble for a long time.

So when you're doing something like that, your parents don't bother you because you're not in trouble.

But it's always been my silent friend.

>> How young did you start your art career?

>> I'm the son of a teenage parent that gave up his dream of being an artist.

So I learned very early, picked it up very early.

My father was born in '45, so you can imagine in the '50s and '60s he didn't have a lot of outlets for art.

And so I came along and was kind of able to pick up the baton in a way that he was not able to.

>> He taught you the trade?

>> He didn't teach me the trade.

My dad was never one to force himself on me.

He wanted me to find my own destiny, but when it's generational and it's DNA-based, you imitate what you see.

And so at that time, that's exactly what I did.

My dad didn't have a lot of opportunity, so he was a frustrated artist, more or less, in the Baltimore art scene.

And so he went into printing, which would later benefit me.

>> Tell me how your art reflects your own personal journey, but also some of the culture of Baltimore.

>> Well, you know, I think some things are just innate, you know, and some things are DNA-based.

It took me a long time to realize that the things that I was doing and the things that my dad was doing was actually implanted in us.

You know, it took me to take six or seven trips to Africa to see a lot of the things that show up automatically in our work, 'cause we were both "at that point," you know, self-taught artists.

So Baltimore is such a part of my being that it is in my work whether I want to be or not.

You know, Baltimore has a very kind of a rigid, blue-collar standard.

And so there are a lot of things that happen here that naturally come out in my work, the struggles of our people, the disenfranchise aspect of the neighborhoods and the communities in Baltimore.

I try to put a spin on it, but it shows up in all of my work.

And so I think that where you come from is the basis of how you articulate the world.

And so I like to think that that Baltimore impact is one of the things that separates my work from a lot of different artists.

>> You mentioned your trips to Africa.

What is the intersection between art in Africa and art of African Americans?

>> I think the intersection, again, is the DNA part of it.

You know, it took me my first trip to Africa to realize that I was definitely American and that I wasn't as African as I thought I was.

And so it's been interesting to see how things have folded over over the last two decades.

I've been going there -- I celebrated my 20th year traveling to Africa this particular year, and to see the difference in the two cultures and how they intersect at this particular point in time, and especially what's happened to us specifically in the United States, has impacted all art.

It's affected art, it's affected music, and so for me to be one of the vessels that channeled that, those visions and those stories, I just think it's in a very, very important time in art.

You know, this country has gone through a dismantling more or less of an appreciation for the arts and music and dance.

They took it out of schools in the '90s, and we're seeing the repercussions of that actually affecting us even today.

And so it's important for us to tell those stories.

>> When I was working in Harlem, in New York, I had to raise some protests because you're right, because of school budget shortages, the first place they cut in public schools are arts and culture, the creative sciences.

You know, I see culture as also a science.

I see art as a science just as important as the applied sciences, mathematics, you know, biology, chemistry, physics, et cetera.

How do you see art as a science?

>> I see it as a science.

I see it as a way of life.

I see as a religion.

I see it as a spirit.

I see it as a multitude of things because it encapsulates all the different aspects of the things that we don't normally see.

You know, it's like -- it's a connector.

That's why art is such a universal therapy for people, and it's why music is universal.

There's certain things that become universal just by the nature of its creation.

And so, you know, a lot of times we try to over-theorize what it means and where it fits, and it's just as natural as us breathing.

We've been drawing on side of caves since the beginning of time.

It's just that those stories have channeled through artists and been depicted and managed and held in certain esteem.

>> I noticed last time I went to Baltimore, there are a lot more murals, art depiction on the walls of buildings.

Sometimes abandoned buildings are brought to life by the artistic visualization.

Can you talk to our audience about how you believe it's important for every community to have some visual presentation of the core values of their community?

>> Man, that is -- phew.

That would be an hour show because that's how important it is.

Baltimore is suffering in the arts right now.

It's fashionable to be -- to create these art initiatives -- >> There's an art district in Baltimore.

>> There's an art district.

There's several art districts in Baltimore.

Again, certain things are a trend.

And that becomes the trend, to designate certain areas as art initiative areas.

And I think that sometimes that's good.

Sometimes that's bad because there are many silenced voices of African-American artists in Baltimore even today.

We have had masters come to Baltimore.

We've got some of the most popular artists in the world right now, Joyce Scott and several other artists that are doing fantastic globally right now, right from Baltimore.

When you talk about the murals in Baltimore, the murals in Baltimore are -- there could never be enough of them.

And what happens is that it needs budgets as -- >> Explain why -- or explain why.

>> Because the impact of art in communities gives each community a personality.

And so when you don't have that, that's when graffiti -- because graffiti comes in all different shapes and forms -- comes into play.

When you start talking about the blight that's happening in cities.

You know, the first thing they want to do when there's blight in the city is to bring art into that community.

But I believe that art should be a mainstay of where you go, not just as an "exaggeration" of what's needed.

And so even when you start talking about budgets, artists are not really being paid to do muralization in Baltimore the way that artists in some other neighboring cities like Philadelphia and other places, and I would love to see that kind of initiative take place in Baltimore City, because we have 30,000 buildings just being slated for demolishment in Baltimore right now.

>> 30,000?

>> 30,000 buildings in Baltimore.

>> Within the city limits?

>> Within the last decade have been slated to be torn down in Baltimore City.

We actually have more buildings in Baltimore now than we have people because, you know, we're around 650,00 675,000 people in Baltimore.

And so, yeah, I would love to see that be something that's not just taken up and put back into a place of esteem in Baltimore, but in a lot of surrounding cities.

>> Well, it's a national issue.

>> Yes, it is.

>> I think what you're describing in Baltimore, I could take you to the South Side of Chicago.

>> Absolutely.

>> I could take you to Houston, Detroit, you mentioned Philly, St. Louis, Los Angeles.

>> I'm with you.

That's the thing I notice as I travel.

>> Down South, Birmingham, Atlanta.

>> Just got back from Alabama, but I'm also going into some places like Greensboro and some places that are now adapting what we're talking about, re-establishing the importance of those things, and it's amazing to see.

>> Greensboro, you know, is where the student sit-ins started.

>> Yes.

>> And now there are murals in Greensboro about the early stages of the civil rights movement.

>> Exactly.

>> How do you see the future of art, particularly fine arts, being a fundamental proponent of people being inspired to make more progress in their own lives?

>> Well, there's two things, I believe, that are very, very important.

Having a voice and telling a story.

Those two things now, and we're watching so many groups now struggling to have a voice.

But we're also in an important time where people are able to tell their stories.

And so for me, those two things together are powerful.

We're seeing some of the most enlightening documentaries now on people that we never heard their stories before.

And that same thing applies to art.

There's a viewfinder of things being depicted now that weren't depicted before.

You know, this whole social justice adjustment that happened to us within this last five years is affecting all art in one way or fashion or form.

>> So you're saying that the infusion of social consciousness and the visualization of art is -- you can detect more prevalent?

>> Absolutely.

When we were going through the civil rights movement, there were certain things that were affecting the artists at that particular time.

There was a voice that needed to be heard.

There was a story that needed to be told at that time.

And when you look at the civil rights movement versus where we are now and how much time in between that vacuum of being able to say certain things, that's why this time is so important, because it's more or less picking up and connecting those stories and those voices again in a way that it wasn't maybe over the last two decades.

See, maybe music filled in that void.

You know, now it's time for art to do it.

You know, we have two different sides of art.

We have the commercially successful side of art.

We also have the fine art part of art.

And many people may not know the difference between the two.

When you go to your museum, that is a fine art aesthetic.

But I can tell you hundreds of artists that became popular during the latest art revolution that nobody coined the phrase for from 1985 to 2005, when artists were going into communities.

"The Cosby Show" era and the "Good Times" show era created another art revolution that nobody ever documented.

And so there were artists like Charles Bibbs, Paul Goodnight, and a whole host of other artists, and I was fortunate enough to come through that period of time where we picked up the mantle and started doing works that were, number one, affordable works.

We were going into communities.

They could see us, they could touch us, they could feel us.

And we're just getting to a point now and say, "Hey, those guys did something in that period of time that completely adjusted how people look at art."

And so we're sending more and more people into museums.

We have people now that are collecting for their homes and collecting for their families.

But I think that art has this role now that has been ignored by school systems, and when it comes to economics, it's always thrown to the side.

But yet art is always the thing that people want to use as an initiative to bring attention to certain things that are not happening in communities.

So I think that as long as the voice is being heard and the stories that are being told, then art will always have a place in our community.

>> So are you saying that there's still a career pathway for artists to be a full-time artist and make a living?

>> I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I got my first job -- >> That's a very important question.

>> I know, but I say that for a reason.

I'm one of the ones that never made an excuse for not being an artist, and many artists fall into that.

I lived in an environment where nobody told me, "Hey, you can't do art because you won't make a living."

And I never heard that from my parents.

And then they were born in '45.

So what I'm saying is that I got my first job when I was 14 in the arts and I opened my first business when I was 17 in the arts, and I've been a full-time artist my whole life, and I believe that that's possible for anyone that moves with intention.

You know, I move with intention to do this because my dad couldn't, you know, so, yes, it's a viable time when you look at what's happening in social media, where you're looking at we are now in this multimedia facet of life where all of these things are being glued together by media, and it's just an exciting time for artists.

This is the most exciting time to be an artist.

Things that we couldn't afford to participate in now we can participate in because of technology.

I watched the biggest difference between the "Good Times" era and the Bill Cosby era was when "Good Times" was on and Ernie Barnes' works were available, you couldn't find them anywhere versus when the Bill Cosby era came in, it was readily available because the printing industry had gone through a major technological evolution.

And so as you add film media and video -- >> The digital age, that transformation is still evolving.

>> It's evolving at a pace faster than most of us can keep up, because if you look at Netflix, you look at Amazon, and you look at the types of documentaries that are coming out, there's -- these stories are coming in droves and educating us on a level that we've never been educated on, and they're giving us a snapshot of life that we never had a chance to participate in.

And so while we have other groups of people that's just trying to cancel us from talking about these stories, there's an undeniable part that art plays in telling those stories and depicting those stories.

>> You mentioned cancel culture.

>> Yes, sir.

>> Is that possible?

Can culture be canceled?

>> Yes, if you get to the point where comedians can't tell jokes because everybody wants to have their voice protected, then what's stopping that from someone to say, "Hey, we don't want this picture to be shown in a museum"?

>> Censorship.

>> Yes, it's already happening.

You can say a word now and you can lose your whole career.

And some of that was for our benefit so that the N-word wouldn't be used.

But now it's to the point where everybody's so sensitive about their words and their voice that censorship is happening right in front of our face.

So my thing is that how long is it going to take for it to affect mainstream art where they start to decide what can and can't be depicted.

>> Do you see that what was once called the mainstream art, fine art versus third world art, community art, you know... >> I understand.

>> They label it all different names except mainstream.

>> Exactly.

>> But with the demographics changing, do you see the art that you do, is it becoming the new mainstream?

>> You got Amy Sherald, who just did the presidential portrait.

You got Kehinde Wiley, who just did Obama's portrait.

You got Joyce Scott, who was known as a craft artist.

We're watching now artists like Carey James Marshall and other artists become very, very popular and successful even in the art auction realm right now, where artists, African-American artists, were never really held or seen as important in that realm.

And so as we talk about all these things that are changing things slowly, if you can imagine when people snatch the blanket off of that Obama portrait and saw him sitting there with them flowers in the background, they had never saw that before, and now they have been sensitized to seeing something different within that split second.

And Kehinde Wiley is known the world over for the work that he's been doing, same thing with Amy Sherald and what she's been doing for her work.

So I think it's a very exciting time as we see these crossovers happening because, you know, our masters, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence's, and all these people are still not being held in the proper esteem in the art industry even today.

But progress is progress.

We could say that about even the existence of being African American in this country.

But there's still a lot of things that are moving at a snail's pace.

>> In academic settings, there was an emphasis for several decades on the oral tradition, making sure people gave voice to telling their stories.

Would you say now, in addition to the oral tradition, there's a visual tradition?

Can you speak about the importance of the visualization of the voice?

>> I think that even with the the visualization of voices, even there with the spoken word, because they paint a picture with words that you can see in your head.

So while we have these divisions in each one of those things, they're pretty much the same, the effect is the same -- >> And they're connected.

I tell hip-hop artists all the time.

>> Exactly.

>> This just didn't fall out of the sky.

>> Exactly.

>> It's connected to R&B, it's connected to gospel, it's connected to jazz, it's connected to the blues.

It's connected to the griot in Africa with the drum.

>> Exactly.

These things are all stitched together, woven together.

And even when you try to take them apart, they continue to be woven together.

And so I think that what needs to happen is that as long as we keep the dialogue open about the importance of art in our community, and people keep fighting for that -- but it's going to continue because artists are still here to produce those things.

Whether they're supported or not, they're gonna be doing this work.

We're not just doing this work because of what happens in museums or what happens in our communities.

We're doing it because the creator made us the vessels to do this work.

Whether you recognize it as being important really is quite irrelevant to an artist.

As far as I'm concerned, He only gave me this so that I won't go crazy.

[ Laughs ] He gave me a therapeutic place to be able to go, and it just so happens that I'm a vessel, and what happens with this work, and I think other artists kind of view it the same way.

When you listen to writers, musicians, and artists talk about their craft, you hear a continuity of information and you hear this spiritual connection.

You hear this heritage, this traditional weaving of experiences, you know?

And so I just think we're in a very exciting time, despite how dismal things sound.

It's going to happen whether we want it to or not.

>> Right before James Baldwin passed, he and I talked about having a writers collective to ensure that the tradition of his writing would be continued by younger people.

Do you envision having a collective of fine artists to mentor up-and-coming young artists?

>> Mentorship has been something that's been implanted in me from my earliest stages as an artist, not just from my dad, who was a coach, and he went into our communities and made all the bad boys fight each other in a boxing format.

He taught wrestling.

He formalized the hostility that they were carrying with them.

It's just we have to find a way to bridge the divide between the things that are happening.

And for me, I've always mentored artists because I'd never had anybody mentor me.

As a matter of fact, my high school teacher made me come back every year to speak to the children and then share what I learned in college.

But I've also mentored literally hundreds of artists because that's the tradition that I learned it in.

And I think that that's the part that's happening even today.

But we don't talk about it.

We don't see it, so we don't think it exists.

Mentorship is the reason why the arts have been able to hold on with all the other distractions that's happening in this world today.

And so when you see an artist and their work's on a wall, just don't assume that they have not paid it forward or given back, because the majority of them have.

You know, traditionally, HBCUs had a whole cultivation of what was happening with African-American artists, but something happened and it got dismantled with them, just like what happened with arts being in public schools got dismantled.

There's a thing that's -- that kind of separates us, and the arts is always one of those things that's the easiest thing to dispose of.

So I think mentorship is crucial in keeping this lifeline moving forward.

There are so many new artists with new visions and new stories and new voices that are just as loud today as it was back in the civil rights movement.

>> What gives you your greatest sense of optimism?

>> My greatest sense of optimism is the fact that I now understand how the psyche of an African American has changed in the last 20 years.

And to go to a place and recognize -- >> Change for the better or change for the worse?

>> For the better.

We are really living in a time where we're celebrating our Blackness.

We're celebrating where we come from, even if we've never been on a plane to go to Africa.

We are actually the Blackest people on the planet when it comes to our experience here and the things we've had to fight through to have certain rights, and we've had to fight in a way that other people have not.

You've got to remember that we are the strongest of the strongest that made it to this land.

2 million people of us die in transit from other places to get to the United States.

And so we start talking about just slavery and how it's impacted on us as far as our culture and what we were stripped away from to see how we've acquired that stuff, and we're passionate about being -- honoring our origin.

Man, you think about that, it's pretty powerful energy that nobody can tame.

>> Larry Poncho Brown, thank you for joining "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Thank you so much.

>> For more information about "The Chavis Chronicles" and our guests, please visit our website at TheChavisChronicles.com.

Also, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, we are committed to diversity and understand our responsibility in supporting and empowering diverse communities.

Diversity and inclusion is integral to the way we work.

Supporting the financial health of our diverse customers and employees is one of the many ways we remain invested in inclusion for all today, tomorrow, and in the future.

American Petroleum Institute -- through the core elements of API's Energy Excellence Program, our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural-gas and oil industry in the U.S. and around the world.

You can learn more at api.org/apiEnergyExcellence.

Reynolds American, dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against racism and discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

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