You nearly never return home.

The places that I enjoyed in an hour that I was at the time disappeared.

The only in my in my thoughts and and in my artwork.

Yeah.

You grow up, you grow up, and you lose your innocence.

You find out that the world i not the way it was in Sandtown.

You try to recapture things, and by trying to come home.

The only way I can come home is in my memory.

And now in my work Well, this use to be a good sized community of over 5000 people.

We had at least 5 to 6 thousand voters in this neighborhood.

But it used to be a pathway right here.

You walked on to get to my Aunt Nick's house and Uncle Wilder's place.

It's just a fine neighborhood to be in.

But we went from here, from Reno, from plum past sixth Street and from May Avenue to Agnew.

This is my the plac that my grandfather stayed at.

And then once they started buying us out, it then went down from the houses on every street.

Now we got about 3 or 4 houses on, 3 streets.

But nevertheless the neighborhood is still going on.

I lived a wonderful life in Oklahoma, and, and Sandtown was part of it The people that lived here worked for the meatpacking plant, and they used to go across the river to to work at the meatpacking plant in what we call packing town.

And that's the stockyards.

And I used to scare me down, had river bank, and we used to shoot frog and chase rabbits and squirrels and snakes.

This is what I tried to maintain, in my work, because I want to revisit the place.

That way I can look at that and think of all those magic moments I had as a kid here.

And you try to return to the.

To the point in your life when when you thought everything was good in life, you know, so many.

Things.

But my art does.

It returns m back to my innocence, you know.

And you'll see that in a lot of my work.

Just looking at what's here.

This.

The only thing that I think that was here was this tree.

And it was much smaller than this.

But the houses, the houses like that house there, that that remained the same.

That is just about the way it looked when I was a kid.

To me, it was kind o like bones, that they used to, it was put together like a sculptor would do it, and I always, I always liked the wa they looked, different colors.

Just a real nice piece of artwork.

This artist, Melvin Smith, used to live in a house just like this.

Just, memories from his childhood and.

I left home in 1959, and I joined the service, and I. And I didn't come back until, 1997.

It's good to have somebody to realize and come back home to do something for the old neighborhood.

I'm a self-taught artist and, I think it's just, from found experiences and ones that I would leave, we don't want to come back, but I thank God for Melvin.

Melvins doing a wonderful job.

My mission is that it is universal.

And I think it is.

I think that, I think that again, I think we all experience, the feeling of that you know, that inner loneliness.

I think we all been touched by that.

I think we, most people again, come from some somewhere in your lineage.

There's there was poverty if you live in America because royal families didn't come to America.

Since I've been here, I've had severa of several people from different ethnic backgrounds to say, geez, I, I came out of a house just like that, and it lets m know that my work is universal.

So.

[dog bark] I remember being in my my grandfather's house, and it was after my, my dad had passed away and I had flown down here to, to the funeral.

And the room was packed with, a lot of people.

And someone asked me a question and I started talking, and he started to cry and my grandfather started to cry.

And so my Aunt Lou says, Papa, Papa, what's wrong?

I mean, why are you crying?

And he said that, I heard Shakeys voice.

That boys sounds just like his dad.

He looked like him.

Talks like him.

He's so much like his dad.

It's just like his dad's in this room.

It's the same wallpaper that was in the room, at the time that he made tha statement about me and my dad.

And so, this then that touched me so that, and, that I had to leave, and he came on my work like this.

I like how it sets off the board.

It looked really different if he had set it flat in a painting.

But since its 3D, it's really different.

You know, your mom's always telling you stories.

You know, when you were a child about how they grew up, etc.

so I actually seeing it in actual form like this really makes it real for the kids.

I think.

I'm a collagist, but I think, because everything I do is really collage.

It might, it's still I'm still a sculptor, but it's it's based on collage.

I went from, doing flat stuff to to, objects protruding from a surface to just, the object itself.

Just a piece of sculpture, which is what I found.

Objects are.

The found object is is the masks.

This is my friend Melvin Wilson.

I liked his smile.

And that's what drove me into creating a piece of artwork of him.

This is my big brother, Robert Victor.

He's a symbol of our family.

This is Miss Dabney, and I like the the sculpture look of her face.

She had those African features that were really beautiful, and I liked her.

And that's why she's in my work.

Why do I do them?

They just pop up into my work?

I really don't have no no designs.

I people that seem to have been important to me in some fashion.

Another, whether they were strange, not, giving to me.

I've touched me in some fashion.

They become part of my work, and there's no such thing as a junkyard.

This is a art supply place.

I have never seen a jjunkyard in my life.

I saw a place that had a lot of important pieces of.

Of items that could go in a piece of nice artwork.

Oh, yeah, there we go my masks, pretty muc what I consider found objects.

I got the makings of something here.

Yeah.

When I go into the junkyard, it's kind of like being in a spiritual place to me.

This over here?

Well, I'm.

I'm kind of, See, something here, just, the form and, the colors really excite me.

Sometimes I can see, a color.

It can be a shape.

It can be all kind of, idiosyncrasies that this person, that I saw in this person.

And then I might see it in this, this mask, feeling in these found objects.

And, I go from there.

Well, I'm seeing an image of a I'm a mask, uh, I'm satisfied with what I see.

I like this this here is a sweet.and I like that part of it.

I just set out to collect items that I like, you know, pieces and shapes and colors that I like.

And then, and then when I start to move them around, images come up.

Yeah.

And, this is a keeper.

Nah, that wont do it.

It has that same kind of flair about it like the other piece, and I can make this is a nice piece.

I can get something off there.

Mounds of items.

Look at this.

Just nice pieces of collage and found objects and assemblage.

It gives me a chance.

It's a it's was part of a, exploratory, journey that you tak when you do that kind of work.

You know, that's what's so wonderful about it.

This is a fit o pleasure that I have when I go to this place, and I'm never, I feel like, I'm never bored.

You know, I I'm off to myself.

I just love it, you know, found objects.

It's it's all based o the artist selection of items.

And that's a very personal thing.

And and that comes from personal experiences.

And that's what you ar expressing personal experiences.

And, and I gues if you have personal experiences that you can relate to in a junkyard, this is a this is a place to come.

And I and I can relate to the things with my personal experiences.

And I can get ideas from from being in a junkyard.

I'm looking for the spirit of the person I. I feel that once I, I do a piece I found the rest of it.

This should complete the project.

This should make a very nice mask, Most communities, most, states are using African artifacts to represent African American culture.

We need to be represented as a culture.

Also, African Americans, we are a unique people and we have our own culture.

And it's not African.

It is African American.

And that should be recognized and not be, replaced with African artifacts.

Look how they did the lips, you see.

So you can be creative discourse.

You think so?

I'm not real.

Othe people think is real attractive.

You see, I ha distinct, had different ideas.

I think that.

I want them to be touched by the fact that, we all humans.

We're all here in this world alone and we are all touched by that, universal feeling that we have of being in this world alone.

My dad was a a, fantastic baseball player.

And he he went off and tried ou from the Kansas City Monarchs.

He made the team, but he had five kids and they didn't pay a lot of money in those days, so he had to come home.

So this piece is, is, is a heartbreaking piece because, my, my dad's dreams were not fulfilled.

And, and it showed every day, you know, every day we live with him, we experience a man and that really was, hurt by not fulfilling what he wanted to do in life.

This is my mother.

Her name was Fanny.

And, she was married to this baseball player that wanted to play baseball.

And he had kids, and he was miserable, and her life was miserable because of that.

She had a pretty miserable life.

But she loved my dad and they loved each other.

But, there was tension simply because he was there and he wanted to be somewhere else.

That's probably the most painful part of my life was the early death of my mother.

My ideas come from my life experiences.

Which means that it all started from Sandtown.