(International) --Tackling head-on the sensitive issue of children's lives lost to extreme violence, international artist Aberjhani kicked off the 2019 art season with the launch of the provocative new series, "Kaleidoscope Moons for Children Gone Too Soon."

The series successfully combines themes of social and environmental justice with aesthetics of highly-appealing formats and styles to confront one of the most disturbing concerns of modern times. It kicked off with 3 canvases and a special series gallery posted on Fine Art America/Pixels. The gallery can be found on this page: Kaleidoscope Moons.

The posted canvases are numbered but each also has an individual title. Number 1 is "Ascension," number 2 ", and number 3 "Intensified." Product pages each carry a description of the specific artwork but also contain the following description by the artist of the new series: 

"During the holiday season some years ago, I lost a niece and nephew to extreme violence and chose to honor their lives by naming a Christmas tree after them. It was my way of gifting them the joy of which they had been robbed. The new Kaleidoscope Moons Series is an extension of that tradition in honor of children lost to such violence around the world as we move forward into 2019. It is also an expression of standing in solidarity with families who have endured these losses as they adjust to something from which they are unlikely to ever fully recover. Therefore, in lieu of a Christmas tree: the Kaleidoscope Moons Series. 

“Specifically:  The news out of Houston, Texas (USA) was particularly gruesome upon learning that 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes had been shot and killed while in a car with her family the morning before New Year's Eve. Her mother, LaPorsha Washington, was also shot but survived along with 3 other daughters. In my hometown of Savannah, Georgia, an up-and-coming 17-year-old rapper named Tyrese Carter and a 20-year-old named Jamar Davis Jr. were shot dead within 24 hours after the New Year got underway.

“The family of one gun violence victim, former university student Rebecca Foley killed 6 years ago in Savannah, announced plans to fight back. They are suing, to the tune of $35 million, the owners of the apartment complex where Ms. Foley was killed for the "inadequate security" they feel contributed to her death.

“Obviously art cannot bring back any of our loved ones lost to senseless violence. But for those who did not get their chance to establish mega-stardom and document their passage on this journey we call life, the Kaleidoscope Moons Series can testify on their behalf. It can proclaim they were here and their lives were as deserving of celebration and remembrance as anyone's."

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Bright Skylark Artnotes

The word accountable has a friendlier ring to it when applied to someone other than oneself. Used in a statement such as, “Today I will hold myself accountable for making a positive difference in the world,” it feels more nakedly ominous than courageous or inspiring.

​Simply put, it means acceptance of responsibility for a specific action or desired outcome. That can be a good or bad thing depending on motives and results involved. In the example at hand, the motive is pursuit of social justice and the desired result is a long-sought correction of history.

The concept of accountability has my full attention at present because of the admirable way some 400 Girl Scouts made their way to the Georgia State capital to urge lawmakers to remove the late white supremacist Eugene Talmadge’s name from the impressive bridge spanning the Savannah River between the city and Hutchison Island, and replace it with that of their founder: Juliette Gordon Low. With the scouts symbolically and strategically at this side, Rep. Ron Stephens (R-GA) on February 6, 2018, introduced House Resolution 1054: “A RESOLUTION honoring the life of Ms. Juliette Gordon Low and dedicating a bridge in her memory; and for other purposes.”

Joining Stephens, a republican, on the bill’s sponsorship were five democrats: Rep. Gloria Frazier, Rep. Carl Gilliard, Rep. Mickey Stephens, Rep. Al Williams, and Rep. Teri Anulewicz. 

​The Girl Scouts’ highly-commendable move won them much applause across the nation. It also prompted questions concerning why African-American leaders and community members in Savannah and throughout Georgia have done so little to protest the current name of the bridge or have it changed. Why, for example, in a city famous for its majority-black population, was the African-American presence in the audience at the historic Symposium to Rename the Talmadge Bridge held at the Savannah Theater on September 5, 2017, so overwhelmingly under-represented? As in clearly, visibly, a lot less than half the attendees?   

The issue is at least as much about engaging the present and preparing for the future as it is about correcting a misstep from the past. Imagine, for example, if during this 2018 Black History Month educators, entrepreneurs, social justice activists, church members, mosque members, temple members, fraternity groups, student groups, government employees, and rappers all had gone one big step beyond applauding our forebears for their triumphs and sacrifices. What if citizens had chosen to hold themselves accountable for staging a peaceful march across Savannah’s bridge in the manner of those who made the perilous trek across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965––minus the bloodshed?
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What might it be like to hold ourselves personally accountable for making memorable corrective history instead of simply praising what others have already contributed to it, even as we (apparently) ignore the costs of their unwavering commitment where the name of the bridge is concerned? 

The question of why black leaders and followers in the city should be singled out as the ones to hold themselves most accountable is a fair one. The answers are agonizingly numerous. One would have to be because: no one has likely already lost, or will continue to lose, anywhere near as much from failure to change the bridge’s name. Consider what it means to sanction via silence the daily overt devaluation of an entire population. Calculate how that institutionalized devaluation translates into impoverished families and individuals, and communities traumatized by gun violence, domestic violence, and social unease as well as disproportionate numbers of unemployed and imprisoned people of African descent.
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But among the most important reasons black leaders and community members in different capacities should contemplate holding themselves accountable in this scenario is the exercise which doing so could provide, for currently and following generations, in serving as effective stewards of freedom and justice.  On a lighter side: possible photo opportunities stemming from a peaceful march across the bridge would not hurt at all during these social-media-addicted times. 

​Certainly the Girl Scouts make a good case for naming the bridge after Juliette Gordon Lowe (and if House Resolution 1054 makes it through the approval process that is exactly what will happen). Some of the reasoning stated in HR 1054 is debatable but few would argue with these: 

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​That there are already considerable public acknowledgements of Low—most notably the district bearing her name and year-round promotions of the same––and virtually none of other significant historical figures seems to have been discounted.      

​Compelling cases may also have been made for a number of other possibilities. My personal favorite happens to be The Tomochichi-Oglethorpe Bridge because combining the two names could symbolize the kind of coexistence for which so many are currently advocating.

Yet Civil War veteran and pioneering educator and author Susie Taylor King, publisher and hero of the Great Migration Robert Abbott, pre-Civil War entrepreneur and spiritual leader Andrew Cox Marshall, and long-time mainstay of the Poetry Society of Georgia Gerald Chan Sieg, all of whom held themselves accountable for facilitating the correction of unjust conditions, would also have made suitable choices. Opting for “The Savannah River Bridge” could be neutrally serviceable enough but also in some ways more of a cop-out than a useful compromise.

What matters more than anything else is engaging the issue, and others of similar significance, with intent to help resolve it in a way that proves more beneficial than antagonistic. We cannot, after all, hold legislators, history itself, or Girl Scouts accountable for righting grievous wrongs if we are not willing to take on the same responsibility ourselves.
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Aberjhani
February 14, 2018
Savannah, GA 

​East St. Louis, IL--Dr. Lena Jane Weathers (1930-2017), who was a lifelong resident of East St. Louis and an invaluable leader and patron of the community, will be honored along with four more late women trustees of the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club on Tuesday, March 21, 2017.
 
The free event, held in honor of Women's History Month 2017, will take place 6 PM in Room 2083 of Building “B” on the East St. Louis Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (ESL SIUE) Higher Education Campus, 601 J.R. Thompson Drive 62201.
 
Other trustee-honorees are poet-novelist-scholar Margaret Walker Alexander (1915-1998); poet-autobiographer-actress-filmmaker Maya Angelou (1928-2014); Pulitzer Prize-winning former Illinois Poet Laureate and novelist Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000); and ESL native daughter Barbara Ann Teer (1937-2008), founder of the National Black Theatre of Harlem.
 
June 17, 2017 will mark the centennial of the birth of Brooks. She and Walker Alexander, whose centennial was observed in 2015, are often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

​Founded in 1986, the Writers Club turned 30 in 2016. Writer Henry Lee Dumas (a.k.a. Henry Dumas, 1934-1968), for whom Eugene B. Redmond has served as literary executor for the past 48 years, is the Club's patron saint.
 
Members of its Soular Systems Ensemble—Roscoe “Ros” Crenshaw, Salim Kenyatta, Charlois Lumpkin (Mali Newman), Darlene Roy (Club prez), and Jaye Willis—will perform “kwansabas” in honor of the trustees. The program will also feature special guests and an art/photo exhibit.

Current Club trustees include: Avery Brooks, Haki R. Madhubuti, Walter Mosley, Quincy Troupe, and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. Among other deceased trustees are: Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) and Raymond R. Patterson (1929-2002).
 
In addition to having appeared here as guests of the Club, trustees also served on the editorial board of Drumvoices Revue, a literary-cultural journal formerly co-published by the Club and SIUE's English Department.

One of the Club's signature inventions is the “kwansaba,” a poem of “sevens”--seven lines, seven words per line, with each word having no more than seven letters. Exceptions to the seven-letter rule are foreign terms, proper nouns and quoted words or passages.
 
Of the trustees, Dr. Weathers and Dr. Ward have written kwansabas. Others have been the subject of special issues of Drumvoices where they were honored with kwansabas.
 
Hundreds of examples of the form appear in Drumvoices and dozens of other publications. In the past couple of years alone, three volumes of poetry--by Tara Betts, Treasure Shields Redmond, and Darlene Roy—have been devoted wholly or in part to the kwansaba.
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For information about the March 21 program or the Club: call 618 650-3991; write EBR Writers Club at P.O. Box 6165, ESL, IL 62201; or email: eredmon@siue.edu.