Below is a transcript of a special conversation between artist Dindga McCannon and Seen’s Editor-in-Chief, Dessane Lopez Cassell, originally held on August 3, 2022, as part of the 11th annual BlackStar Film Festival
Dessane Lopez Cassell: It’s a real pleasure to be with you all here tonight and to be hosting this conversation with Dindga McCannon, an artist whose decades long career is a testament to the power of artmaking as a means of lifelong living and learning. But before I introduce our special guest, I want to start with many thanks to the team that made today’s conversation possible. To our founder and BlackStar CEO, Maori Karmael Holmes, our festival director and former managing editor of Seen, Nehad Khader, and to our curatorial fellow and panels organizer, Farrah Rahaman. Thank you for creating this space. A special thanks as well to T’Shay Williams, Asha Haki-Tyler, all of our volunteers and festival staff, to our Seen intern, Fafa Nutor, and the whole editorial team that assembled our most recent issue of Seen, including our guest editor, Darol Olu Kae, and editors Yasmine Espert, Jasmine Weber, Kavita Rajanna and Shauna Swartz.
The springboard for today’s conversation is the deeply thoughtful profile of Dindga McCannon, penned by Zoé Samudzi for our latest issue of the journal. Dindga, as Zoe writes, is known for her multi-chromatic paintings, textiles and multimedia works. She is also a writer, an illustrator, a wearable art maker, a muralist, and an educator, and a mother.
Dindga is a founding member of Weusi Art Collective, a distinguished group of Afro-centric artists established in Harlem in 1965, against the backdrop of the Black arts movement. Additionally, she is a founding member of Where We At, Black Women Artists Inc, a working group of artists, mothers and educators founded in 1971. As Zoe writes, “Where We At sought to confront the uniquely race and gendered exclusions faced by Black women artists and to bring great sustainability and visibility to their work.” Among their many crucial interventions, which we’ll talk about today, were the numerous exhibitions they held, including organizing one of the first all Black women artists shows in 1971 and providing practical lifelines to their artists and members. Without further ado, please welcome Dindga McCannon.
Dindga McCannon: Thank you for having me.
DLC: We’re big fans, if you can’t tell already. I want to start our conversation off by going back in time. I read somewhere in Bomb Magazine, that you said that you made up your mind about becoming an artist when you were just 10 years old. That was in 1950, when the landscape for Black artists and especially Black women artists was very, very different. Could you talk about what steered you towards that path?
DM: I think the basic thing was that I began to draw and sketch, and a lot of artists from that era, we started drawing cartoons. They had these things in the paper: if you could draw this, you could go to art school and all that type of stuff. We did cartoons and life drawing. I simply fell in love with the process of creating. It took me out of the world that I lived in, which was not a bad world, but it just took me into another beautiful type of space, and I felt that I just wanted to keep that going. I had no idea that women weren’t supposed to be artists or anything about the art world, but it was the feeling—the art of creation—that got me interested.
DLC: Thank you for that. I know we’ve talked a little bit about some of your early experiences as an artist and some of the frustrations that you had in terms of your initial training. I know you studied art in school, and that you went to Fashion Industries High School, which actually is where I went as well for part of high school. But you’ve also talked about the fact that you really didn’t feel like you were getting useful guidance, that you were getting a lot of pushback around having Black figures in your work. Could you talk about those experiences and also the shift when you went to the Art Students League and started studying with folks like Richard Mayhew and so many others?
DM: I think what it was initially, first of all, when I went to fashion industries, was that, by default my parents did not support me being an artist. And I had wanted to go to Art and Design High School [in New York], but then I got my revenge years later because my son went there and then my granddaughter went. [My parents’] compromise was for me to go to Fashion Industries. At the time, I was in a course that steered me towards being a fashion designer. However, it was a very prejudiced world back then—not that things have changed all that much since then—but Black folks really weren’t encouraged to go into that arena either. I failed one class my second year, and instead of giving me guidance and support, they told me I had two alternatives: I could either leave, or I could go into a class where I wouldn’t have enough credits for college. Basically, they would prepare me to become a seamstress in a factory.
At that time, I didn’t even want to go to college, but I was smart enough not to cut my options, so I decided to leave. I ended up going to a high school that was right where Lincoln Center is now. (It was being built then.) It was probably the world’s worst high school, but because it was so bad, the teachers spent most of their time trying to control the kids, and they pretty much left me alone, which meant I had even more time to scribble and draw in the back. Fast forward, I went to City College for a little while, but I was very bored. And then, I would take workshops and whatnot, but I was not encouraged to use Black figures. They wanted me to paint white figures, but I didn’t want to paint white figures.
I wanted to paint Black people because that was natural to me. I’m a Black person. I paint myself, but no, that was not encouraged.
When I met [the folks from] Weusi, I think it was a couple of days after my 17th birthday. They were the catalyst that got me started because they were all about the Black arts movement—doing Black art for Black people and creating an audience as we went along. I was still in search of other knowledge, so I found out that at the Art Students League you could choose your teachers, so I chose Jacob Lawrence, Charles Austin, Richard Mayhew and Al Hollingsworth. They gave me more support. As Black artists, they understood exactly what I was doing. After I left then, then I had enough to continue going on.
DLC: Thank you. I think part of what you’re saying really shows that, one: how education, if done in a way that’s not actually connected with the student, can really sabotage folks early on, and how that can play a huge role in someone’s life and career. But I also feel like part of the undercurrent here is the importance of creating our own spaces, which obviously is something that we feel very strongly about here at BlackStar. This festival is really designed to support a community of Black filmmakers, artists, and folks really working in a variety of media. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about Weusi and why the space that you were creating together with them as a founding member and what you all were offering the community at the time.
DM: Okay. I’ll start with what we were offering the community was art by, about people of color, African Americans, and more importantly positive images. When we started this journey, if you went to Woolworth, there was nothing Black that you could buy on the walls. Art at that time—it just did not include us.
I think the Weusi began as a way of getting a group of artists together and collaboratively pushing our own aesthetics and saying basically that our culture is centuries old, and it’s just as valid as any other culture and we deserve to be heard, seen, and I guess purchased, for people who actually purchased Black art that looked like them and celebrated our lives.
Also, when Weusi started, it started on the projects on 129th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. There must have been about 100 artists out there, at least in my mind. By the next year, the group had gotten down to maybe 30, and the whole premise, we were right in the midst of the Black arts movement, of the Civil Rights movement, and that reflected itself in our artwork.
DLC: I think that’s also a testament to the fact that it’s also important to think about the sustainable side of artmaking, which is something that a lot of folks don’t get taught in school. There is also in some ways a business to being an artist, in terms of being able to support yourself with your work and knowing how to navigate that space. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your work as an educator and what you feel like it’s important to impart to your students.
You’ve taught in such a variety of contexts: in shelters, prisons, summer programs—really interfacing with people in different ways that aren’t just necessarily a traditional formal classroom.
DM: Actually, I found it more fascinating than my life imagined as a professor because art to me is a universal tool. It also has a healing factor. One of the reasons I love working in—I called it the alternative spaces of shelters, jails, day camps, and occasionally schools—was that everybody has a talent. Most people just don’t know what that talent is. Sometimes, art can be, or the way that art is presented to the ordinary person, is you have to draw, and you have to draw so perfectly in this and that. They don’t understand that art is a huge field. Being able to photographically draw somebody is not the only way to go in art. But that’s what you learn. That’s what you can learn if you choose to go to school in the traditional manner.
There’s other arts. There’s needle arts, there’s drawing, there’s cartooning, there’s crafts—all of these art forms. Because I was an artist who was able to use all those different art forms, I was able to create dialogues between the people who I was serving. As any teacher, you have this exchange—you give, but you also receive knowledge and thoughts. The people I taught, their lives were extremely traumatized, but in my space they found a place where they could be themselves, where they could create anything in any media. That made a difference from the rest of their lives because these were institutional settings. My room presented a free open space.
DLC: Absolutely. That way it’s a space where you don’t have to be thinking about the pressures of the everyday, and art can actually be a space for freedom and creation.
DM: And also to encourage people to, whatever talent that you have, to actually use it and to play with it and to let it bring joy into your life.
DLC: I appreciate that. Speaking of multiple talents and also the wearable, can you talk briefly about what you’re wearing right now, which I know is also partly your own creation?
DM: Yeah! First, a couple of things. I made these pants. My top is made by another awesome designer who I’ve known probably for 40-something years, Denise Goring, out in New York. She made the top. [Points to its overlaid design] This is sort of like my signature. I made the pants and I had a wearable art career that probably spanned at least 40, 45 years, and the original reason why I started doing wearable art was because I needed to make money and I found that you can sell art, but there’s only certain people who buy the art, but as a wearable, then you have a bigger audience, which means you have a better way of making a living.
