When artist and musician Paul Rucker was 18, he joined the South Carolina Philharmonic as a double bassist. He was one of two black musicians, but the other moved away the following year. That’s when Rucker noticed something. Not only was he the only black person in the orchestra, but when he looked out into the audience of several thousand people, he realized he was the only black person in the entire building.
“If you look at any symphony in the country right now—even in a chocolate city like Richmond—black people are not proportionately represented in that orchestra,” he says. If you look at art museums and art institutions, the directors and leadership staff are overwhelmingly white.”
Rucker is hoping to change that. He’s part of a VCU initiative, iCubed, that prioritizes hiring faculty from diverse backgrounds and catalyzing collaborations to explore solutions to societal problems. Rucker’s role specifically focuses on racial equity in arts and culture, as an artist-in-residence at the Institute for Contemporary Arts at VCU.
Rucker’s work was a provocative component of the institute’s inaugural exhibition. Storm in the Time of Shelter featured rows of imposing mannequins donning Ku Klux Klan robes made of kente cloth, camouflage, satin and more. The work was accompanied by objects from Rucker’s own collection of KKK memorabilia, pro-slavery books, artifacts related to slavery, and a 20-page newspaper offering historical context.
At the same time Rucker’s work was going up in the ICA, another iCubed fellow, MK Abadoo, was embedded in the VCUarts Department of Dance + Choreography. She explores race and racism in her own work LOCS. In the performance, Abadoo dances with 25 feet of hair that had been braided into her own.
“LOCS is an experiential place for folks to really investigate, and uncover the system of racial oppression,” she says. “Because we’ve all been racialized. How does that show up in us in the ways that we relate to each other? And how do we actually create a space of wellness, a space of compassion, so we can address it?”
Now that her fellowship year is over and Abadoo has been hired as an assistant professor in the dance department, she’s translating the performance into a series of site-specific works, titled LOCS Unchained. The three-part performance will follow the journey that people of African descent took in the process of enslavement—departing from Accra, Ghana, arriving in the Tidewater area, and disbursing from Richmond. Abadoo’s performances will follow that path in reverse, beginning with a performance in Richmond in 2019. To incorporate local context, she’ll work with a Richmond-based artist and production team, and bring in community organizers for collaboration and conversation.
“LOCS is guided by the community,” she says. “That’s really a result of me deepening partnerships with folks here, both in the dance community and in the larger community justice groups.”
She’ll also be teaching her students how to incorporate social justice and community engagement in their own creative work, particularly through a spring 2019 course co-taught with Wes Taylor, a professor in the graphic design department. Together, they’ll challenge students to explore what it means to make art in a community practice.
And back in the ICA as an assistant professor, Paul Rucker will extend his own creative experiences to empower other artists with career-oriented workshops. He’ll also spend the coming year writing a book and leading a series of workshops aimed at nurturing artistic authenticity and dealing with psychological barriers that many creatives face.
Rucker hopes participants will learn how to celebrate small victories, rather than focus on the negatives. “We all have voices in our head that tell us that we’re good or we’re bad, or we’re worthless or we’re brilliant,” he says. “We can easily paralyze ourselves with the negative voices.”
“Nurturing that aspect of risk-taking is a really important part of being a creative. Because there are no real failures—just a documentation of attempts.”
Image: MK Abadoo performing Octavia’s Brood.
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