Rosa Parks Elementary: a fake name for a real place, where Ann Ferguson found that Black boys of 10 and 11 years old were routinely and openly described by school adults as “at risk” of failing, “unsalvageable,” and “bound for jail.” Ferguson's book, a primer on how school labeling practices too often work to marginalize and isolate Black male students and brand them as criminally inclined, dispels the myth that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." As a mother to two sons, a teacher of teachers on Chicago's south side, a sister to an incarcerated young man, and an author who writes about the school-to-prison pipeline, I study Bad Boys like the Bible.
"By high school, I hated almost everyone and I read insatiably. Both, in their owns ways, sprung from a lousy home life. Both functioned as an outlet for me. The anger was redirected from sources at which I wasn't allowed to strike back, and books distracted me from anywhere I didn't want to be...which was mostly everywhere. But it wasn't until some black-clad friends and I wandered into an occult bookstore on Clark Street -- it seemed a suitable stop for us -- and I picked up 'Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illumination' that I realized a book could be a political act. A book could function as a punch in the face, a rallying point, a riot, a revolution, for both author and reader. I had never read anything as venomous as some of the short works of sheer rage collected in Bob Black and Adam Parfrey's anthology of speeches, poems, tirades, tracts and manifestos. I was in love. Not with all the tenets espoused, necessarily -- but with the energy, with the focus. It all clicked together. Not much time ever manages to pass when I don't think of 'Rants,' usually when I'm showing my students the subtle fury of American slave narratives or watching them process the utter contempt and ultimate beauty of Existentialism. Books are acts of rebellion. And as it turns out, they land me in a lot less trouble than a fistfight."
"A 10-year-long conceptual theme in my artistic practice has basically been an attempt to quantify individual human existence. In 2002-2003, I began contemplating the tie between a mental and physical self. The more similar a perception of ones self is to an outside perception of that self, the more "real" that whole self could be. Then in 2007, I read the chapter, "Having An Experience" in Art As Experience by John Dewey. I stumbled upon the use of the word real as in "real experience." Dewey refers to this as a means for labeling situations and episodes. "In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues." (pg 36) The idea of experience, or a lifetime of experience, as a fluid whole changed my way of thinking - Humans have a singular train of thought that speeds around the brain creating polyps of repeated experiences and webs of associations connecting similar and new experiences to the next. Therefore time is directly proportionate to experience (or train of thought). A person will only become whole at the moment of death, when time in their perception ceases to exist. My current 2013 artistic practice and general existence are still deeply influenced by these ideas. I have an innate need to fill my physical time and space with mental movement and momentum. I choose to do this by creating visual artwork of my philosophically insatiable train of thought and anatomical interpretations."
