Over the last week, Burchfield Penney Curatorial and Digital Content Associate, Tiffany Gaines, Preparator, Tom Holt, and Registrar, Rosario Pitta, began the process of transferring 70 of my paintings from my home to the Burchfield Penney Art Center, to prep them for the LEROI: Living in Color Exhibition.
As an artist, this is an exciting time. After six months of planning and discussing, the exhibition is moving forward in concrete ways.
What’s interesting is that in addition to excitement, I’m experiencing an unanticipated side effect.
When Burchfield Penney Acting Director, Scott Propeack, and Tiffany, came to my home in February, to help me choose 70 paintings from over 1500 pieces of my art for inclusion in the exhibit, the process became a mini-review of my life. Memories of people, places and times I’d memorialized on canvas, flooded my mind in stunning reality.
Even now, they continue to play in review.
One of the most haunting of those memories is related to a series of 25 paintings I created in a ten-year period beginning in 2001, which I titled, "Memoirs of a Crackhead."
The majority of paintings in the series are 18 x 12, with one larger canvas measuring 48 x 36. Some might term them, “stark.” For me they reflect the decades of the late 70’s and 80’s when I was living in Los Angeles and touring with my musician/brother, Rick.
Crack was riding a wave of popularity as the “status” drug at that time, and I was on the scene, watching it, fighting it, but never using it
One day a music business executive dropped by my hotel. He was accompanied by one of the most gorgeous women I had even seen. After a few minutes of conversation, this guy shocked me by asking if I could help him score some crack. I had no idea he was a user. Eventually I mentioned some nearby street dealers.
I didn’t hear from either one of them again for days. They literally disappeared. Then came a knock on my door. It was the woman, by herself, looking a lot less beautiful. She said I had to help her. She needed more crack.
I refused.
At that point, she propositioned me as a means of getting money to buy drugs. I told her to get out, but as she left I felt sorry for her and ended up giving her fifty dollars.
Days later she showed up at my hotel again. This time it was the early morning, and she appeared even more ragged and strung out. She’d brought along her young daughter, a child every bit as beautiful as her mother had once appeared. As she begged me for money, she offered her daughter in exchange.
That was the last time I ever gave money to anyone who was going to use it for drugs or allowed them to use drugs in my presence. It’s also a memory I later documented in the painting, Crack of Day.
Five paintings from the Memoirs of a Crackhead Series (excluding the one shown here) will be showcased in my upcoming Burchfield Penney Exhibition, each telling a compelling story of my life and the world around me…all of it “Living in Color.”
LEROI: Living in Color Exhibition includes the work of students from Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology (BCAT,) Buffalo Public Schools (BPS,) Just Buffalo Literary Center (JBLC,) and Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. The exhibition will be on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center through March 26, 2023, presented by M&T Bank, with additional support from organizations and individuals throughout the Western New York community.