Holding the Door Open: An Interview with Homer Jackson

At the closing of a recent conference in Philadelphia on arts and education, participants formed a circle and called out their responses to the event. In the midst of these unmediated testimonials, critiques and wishes, several shouted, "We love you, Homer!"

Artists in Philadelphia willingly testify to their trust and admiration for Homer Jackson. Where institutional culture would hand him the laurels, he understands that his is not a solo art. He is that rare leader who levels the field, acknowledging his collaborators and the limitations of his own contributions, never ignoring the pulsing fact that all art expresses community.

Jackson compares himself to Charles Mingus, the guy who gets the gig so everyone can work, but also has the guts to feature Eric Dolphy, knowing he'll steal the show. If anything, Jackson's medium is opportunity, and the product of his art is community.

Homer Jackson embodies contradiction in many of the same ways a true community does. This 39-year-old multimedia artist is thoroughly familiar with the problems of being an insider, an outsider and the man in the middle. His performance works are made of and for the black community, yet he rarely plays to black audiences. The prisoners he teaches regard him as a product of privilege, and have to be reassured that he was raised and lives in the same neighborhood they and their families call home.

Yet Jackson maintains an unwavering vision and optimism that buoy him above such difficulties. He conceives, he discusses, he finds funds, all to create a collaborative atmosphere in which social distinctions between inmate and printmaker, teenage mother and playwright dissolve. Nor is he cowed by institutions, regarding prisons and foundations alike as awkward players, there to be used and, as necessary, educated.

Even as the following interview for High Performance was taking place, a particularly salient instance of Jackson's self-determination was unfolding. Carole Robinson, founder of the arts and humanities program of the Pennsylvania Prison Society and the main proponent there of Jackson's Link and Dialogue project, resigned her position, citing philosophical differences with the Board. Link and Dialogue's funding, which has come from fines levied against the City of Philadelphia for prison overcrowding and is dispensed by a panel of judges, was threatened. Jackson's response? He has boldly applied to the court himself, and is now negotiating to keep the program alive.

Admittedly, it is difficult, in talking with Homer Jackson, to tell just what his "program" is. Link and Dialogue may be prison-based, but he applies the same principles when teaching North Philly teens at William Penn High. In these settings, as in his performances, he utilizes the latest in technological and cultural forms—like rap, comic books, digital sampling, video—straight from the 'hood. Jackson claims these tools, yet he never takes his eye off the makers. The art is of personal growth, and the program is life work.

It is this belief in the correctness of his methods, and in the abilities of the artists with whom he works, that keeps Jackson going. He is accessible, but in the dicey arena of race and class it would be a mistake to think of him as a cultural translator. Of his audiences, students and collaborators alike he makes one demand: that we come prepared to change. Building community is not necessarily a comfortable process.

HOMER JACKSON: 1982. I was asked to come in and show some slides. This was Holmesburg Prison. The dome of Holmesburg Prison is in the center. That's central control, glass all around, this round dome on it. Some kinda construction work going on, stuff piled everywhere. Steam coming out of vents. It's 200 degrees in there. Pigeons are flying around. People are walking around, guards shouting. It was like a Pirandello prison, like goin' to hell or somethin'. It reminded me of going to New York. It's loud, it's confrontational, your whole body responds to it. Then I walk into the classroom, and the first person I see is Fat Davey Williams, who had murdered his wife. His wife had been a friend of mine. Then I knew I was professional. I could handle that.

I want to talk about your concept of community, how that is played out in the prison.

Joe Simmons, who was my collaborator on the album project, realized that while we were there for four months, twice a week, we never had an altercation. You didn't realize that you were in prison, other than people talking directly about it. That kind of space, that's safe for discussion, for experimentation, that's safe for expressing yourself without undue negative criticism or alienation, is what we try to create. In that process the community develops, because people recognize qualities in somebody else that they feel good about. They want to learn or share. They create these relationships and bonds on their own.

It's hilarious and heartwarming to see guys that under normal conditions would be at each others' throats, like, sayin' who's the best. "You...no, no, you the best." "No. You the best." It's hilarious to see these guys goin', "Nah, you the man." To be able to be a man, and to be an artist at the same time, and to really enjoy listening to someone else's stuff, and then recognizing the difference with what you have, and being able to feel secure in it. This is something that we artists don't even do. So when it comes to creating community, you're talking about people who are desperate to just breathe, and to breathe without a sense of oppression on them, or a sense of being watched. This gives them a chance to interact on a more relaxed basis. The interesting thing is that the classroom is only the spark of that community-building. It's like these guys went through something together, like basic training, and now they know each other.

How does this sense of collaboration and community express itself among the artists you work with?

The artists I work with recognize ourselves as survivors. We all come from similar circumstances as the inmates, and could have been in jail ourselves. We come from working class situations, grew up in a gang-oriented culture, a block away from the drug dealers...

I select people based on their work. Their interests and the nature of their work. They don't necessarily come from a traditional arts background. They are stuck the same way I am, between the traditional mainstream notion of what art is and art education, and coming from other cultures that are outside of that, and still willing to use their culture as their main language. That struggle of maybe never being accepted for what you do because what you do isn't in the best interests of the mainstream.

So we have someone like (poet and playwright) Julia Lopez, who grew up in the South Bronx, single-parent family, the whole thing. Her story is as intense as any one of the women in the project. Or (dancer) Rennie Harris. Rennie is the same kind of person, who comes from the same kind of urban struggle, with gangs and violence, and uses that kind of street culture in his work as a language. And Reggie Byers, a cartoonist, illustrator and publisher of his own comic books. Reggie has been successful, he's had material success, but he's always lost it, and he lost it because he believed that it would always be there. He's had these rises and falls that illustrate what can happen to us if we don't pay attention to basic stuff. He teaches that to the guys. "I've been there. I know what it's like to think that you are the center of gravity."

There's (visual artist) John Abner, who's brother passed away in prison. He was 15, 16 when his brother was incarcerated, and for years never did artwork about it. When he went into Holmesburg prison, the prison where his brother died, he felt like he had given something to his brother.

First of all, it's great to be in a situation where people are starving for what you got. The combination of what you present to them and what it means to them, and what they give back to you and ask you, is so much more powerful than any other situation I've been in. It's exciting. Each of the artists says they've been changed by it. It makes you so much aware of what you have.

You look at the technical innovations in artmaking that people do in prison. The prisoners have to invent to survive. You see the same ingenuity in their artwork. Reggie Byers told me about one guy who said he didn't like his markers because they didn't fit what he'd been using himself. So he goes back to his cell and comes back with a bag of M & Ms. He melts 'em down in a spoon, just the color coating, and uses the coating for watercolor. The idea is usin' what you got to get what you want. That's something all of us artists learn from the prisoners.

When we created this Link and Dialogue a couple of years ago, the intention was to create work that would include the prisoners, and have them deal with having a successful experience, a positive, interactive experience. Making the comic books, the albums, is only a vehicle to get to this other stuff. You have to have a journey to go through. I talk to the people at the Prison Society about this. We're not making these things as PR vehicles. We just want people to have a positive art experience, which they'll have forever. As long as that art object is around, they can say: "I went through this." They don't say: "I did this." They say: "I went through this."

So the publication is not for the public, it's for the participants to express their shared perspective. But they're still isolated from much of the world. It seems the effect would only be to reinforce a skewed perspective.

Part of it is to bring that perspective out in a dialogue. Then you can examine what's been said.

Yes. But the critical analysis is not all that we do. Our intention is not to be counselors. It takes so long to get to the creative part. It takes some people who've never done anything artistically weeks to even consider to do it, and to be honest about how they feel. The majority of what they talk about is fantasy about the life of a super criminal. And gettin' away with it. Ironically, much of what they talk about in that fantasy world is reinforced by popular movies and television.

So that's part of the dialogue, that fantasy. Something we were talking about before is how the Pennsylvania Prison Society doesn't embrace that as a legitimate representation of what they do. Doesn't that throw the other half of the dialogue, where what the inmates say meets the rest of society, into question?

The truth is that the mainstream thinking that we have as a culture doesn't even exist. We're all made out of these little pockets of ideas and feelings and culture. The assumption of how you must behave as a proper person in this society is an illusion, too. You can never match up with the illusion. The difficulty that anybody who has been in trouble has, whether they are a person who's been involved in violent crime, a person who's been a drug addict, a person who's been a problem for their family, whatever, is matching back up to the level of redemption that is an illusion. I am more interested in helping people find a life that reduces their ability to harm other people, less than tweezin' other people into doin' a redemptive thing that other people feel that they have to do.

You also work with students at William Penn High School in North Philadelphia. How do you justify working in a high school through a prison organization?

(Ex-Director of the arts and humanities program) Carole (Robinson)'s and my vision is to expand the Prison Society's program, because we see a direct correlation between the people that we work with on the inside, and people in homeless shelters, people in mental health rehab centers and drug rehab programs. People graduate from jail to one of these, or they graduate from one of these and go to jail. And there's a direct correlation between kids in school marching right into the courtroom and straight to jail. After years of being told by prisoners: "I wish I coulda done this outside," to give them a chance to do it. An opportunity to think differently before they even get into jail. I don't want to be solely associated with the Prison Society because life is bigger than prison, and being associated with one institution isn't enough.

Because they don't want to go past prison. They don't see that as part of their mission. But there's so many people, young people and adults, that are just frustrated. I asked the kids at William Penn: "What does the future look like to you? What do you want? Where are you going?" What they have to say is funny, and sad, and smart, all of it. For the most part, the future looks gloomy to them. And I would dare some adults to say, "Why does it look so gloomy," because in reality, that's what many adults' future is going to look like. We just don't want to say it out loud.

You also work as a curator, both of working artists, and of prisoners' art. Can you mention other exhibits you've curated?

I don't call it curating. My colleague, Lloyd Lawrence—we work together on these things—we call them collaborative installations. We come up with a theme, a concept, and go out to find other artists who have other interests, skills, talents and points of view that we don't have.

The first collaborative installation we did was called "High Flying." The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia) asked me to come up with something, and Lloyd and I proposed a project that would examine black male identity using a pair of sneakers as a metaphor. We looked at Michael Jordan as this incredible leaping, powerful symbol for black male youth. The flip side was the story of the Palmares people, who were a group of Africans who escaped from slavery in Brazil 300-400 years ago. For 75 years, they developed their own communities called quilombos. There were a number of them throughout Brazil, in the Amazon. One of those quilombos was called Palmares. They lived in relationship with the native Americans, and they practiced traditional West African religion. After 70 years, the Portuguese government developed cannons that were lighter, and were able to move through the Amazon with them. They went to war and defeated most of the quilombos. The last quilombo was Palmares. The leader of the group was called Zumbi. Instead of going back into slavery, Zumbi and his soldiers jumped off a mountain to their death. In Brazil—and there are more black people in Brazil than in the United States—they believe that they flew back to Africa. So I tied Michael Jordan and Zumbi flying back to Africa as a vehicle, and asked people to talk about it in any way they wanted to. It was wide open; people did all kinds of different stuff. It was a really successful show. Since then we've done about five of them.

Your installations are always collaborative, so where your work meets the conventions of the art world it also carries this sense of community.

That also comes with the nature of media art. You cannot make a film by yourself. One of the things Lloyd and I talk about all the time is that visual artists are so busy sellin' ourselves out, and our ideas out, even before somebody's offered to buy. There aren't many opportunities. Why are we competing with each other when we're not even going to get anything? So it makes more sense to collaborate with each other, to pool our few resources together, to get something done. Over and over I see really talented visual artists who barely can have one exhibition every two years. At least you need to do one thing a year. So I ask people to participate with me in this one thing. I pay them money, pay for their supplies. I feel that if you ask somebody to do something, make sure it's easy for them to do it, which isn't something that traditional curators do. Traditional curators go around with a concept that they have, and try to pick one that you have that fits that. Which isn't never nearly true. Half of their work is spent writing catalogs that try to pull all this disconnected shit together under this one theme. We talk to people and ask them to create a new piece for this particular idea.

We utilize the notion of baseball. Sometimes you don't have to try to hit a home-run. Sometimes you bunt. Gettin' around the bases is what's the issue. We try to get artists to realize that if each of us bunts to the next person's work, the audience gets around this whole space and recognizes the notion of what it is we're talkin' about. Each individual piece doesn't have to represent the whole of the idea. Elements of the idea get people thinking, and help people move through the whole space. It's like army ants. They all are individual selves, but they all connect to a whole. They all have their little job to do that brings together the whole community.

I'm the, I wouldn't say mastermind, I'd say the slave, a part of the machinery to make it happen. As artists we need as many opportunities to talk to each other as possible. The irony is that artists, like social workers, like dentists, like doctors, need the opportunity to come together to discuss those anxieties. They develop strategies to survive that way. We're one of the few people on earth who do not recognize our professionalism. We have to be reminded that nobody gives a shit if you don't pay your bills. Artists are the only people who feel guilty asking for money. Everybody else is expected to pay somebody. They never are expected to pay us. So the heart of a lot of the work that I do recognizes that if I alone, as a struggling artist, can get through the door, I should hold the door open. Not only to get in, but to see if you can steal some shit from the inside and take it out. Bein' a spy in the house of money. That's the heart of what I do: makin' a way for me, makin' a way for somebody else.

In the work that Lloyd and I do, we deal with idiosyncrasies of black culture. We take these idiosyncrasies and blow them up. We use them as a vehicle for dialogue, community self-evaluation, praise and criticism.

The issue of exploding cultural idiosyncrasies has a lot to do with the audience, too. One of the things I try to ask an institution is to have a black audience, a percentage of black people in the audience. We have these cultural idiosyncrasies that no other community is going to understand. One of the things Lloyd and I talk about all the time is that in these times of multiculturalism there are a lot of artists of various ethnic backgrounds that do work that sort of uses those cultural idiosyncrasies, but isn't designed to be presented for that community nor are they designed to uplift or educate that community. So they function as translators, presenting somebody else's stuff to somebody. That's a role I really don't want. I want my work to have meaning, to uplift, educate, celebrate and support the community from which it comes.

You tend to work through institutions established within the avant-garde art world, like Hallwalls or the ICA. You're not reaching communities in struggle, particularly those of color.

That's an interesting thing. I once asked (poet and performance artist) William Pope L.: "Why is it that your work is accepted by so-called white institutions as representative of black performance art, while institutions in the black community don't even hire you?" He said he doesn't even understand it. I have a similar issue. The Afro (-American Cultural and Historical Museum, Philadelphia), or any other black institution, wouldn't even ask me.

Institutions of color suffer from a number of fears. One of them is the fear of the unknown. It's not even a matter of mainstream versus the avant-garde. Not only do you have people like myself, and Robbie McCauley, William Pope L. and Coco Fusco, who you can call nut cases, but on the flipside you have people who do fashion shows, comedians, gospel groups, who aren't part of what you call good curating in those kind of spaces. They have to rent the place.

Right. It's insane for black cultural institutions to think that way. What's in the middle is what's accepted by whitestream institutions and major institutions of color. If Bill T. Jones has worked out for one institution of color in, say, Jersey or Chicago, then he can work for others. In your own community, institutions of color—or any cultural institutions—wouldn't select you, or me, to do what I do best, before they'd select somebody from out of town to do that.

My issue with artists of color is that we don't know each other. I would like to be able to take you out to dinner when you come to my town. But if you don't give a fuck about who I am, and try to meet me, how are we goin' to know each other? There's a brain shortage in the community of color among artists and arts institutions. There's a certain separateness, an inability to cross over class among artists of color.

You're saying the problem is an implicit class structure in the arts, who can play what theater or command what deal....

One of the problems is that the legacies of Bill T. Jones and those other major artists of color disappear with them. There ain't no tall tales coming from the community, there's only tall tales coming from white people. It's not surprising that the experts on black culture are white people. Yet they gotta go talk to black people to get their information. I know some of those white people who are experts, and I think it's hilarious. And it's partially our own fault.

Yet you continue to work with the "whitestream" institutions. The message is always saturated with a political, cultural, even an outsider perspective. At the last performance you and Lloyd did ("Last Flight of a Wingtip," presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, May 15, 1996) the audience was almost exclusively white, and too polite. Wouldn't you like to be presenting it in another context?

Absolutely. The work I do as an artist isn't designed to deal with white people's anxieties. One of the things I see a lot from black artists, particularly those with visibility and who work in mainstream institutions, is that they create protest work to allow white people to feel good. It pisses me off. It tires me out. I'm interested in giving black people a voice for issues that they talk about intimately in their own community.

One of the things that the character in that piece says is that to be a white person without any money is a waste of whiteness. Which is what black people talk about all the time. Underachieving white people are a joke to us. The sad thing is that white people and black people of the same class in this country have not become a coalition for each other, for survival. The issues are the same. We broke! And there's more poor white people than there are black people. Why can't we come together as a coalition and do something that's going to benefit us all? Like don't we need child care, don't we need health care, don't we need some decent food?

Gil Ott is a High Performance contributing editor. he is the author of ten books of poetry, and is editor and publisher of Singing Horse Press in Philadelphia. He piece "Sharing the Future: The Arts and Community Development" appeared in Winter 1994 issue of High Performance.

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Holding the Door Open: An Interview with Homer Jackson

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