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“We don’T CREATE A FANTASY WORLD TO ESCAPE REALITY, WE CREATE IT TO BE ABLE TO STAY.” -Lynda Berry Nearly ten years ago, the Creative Vision Factory was born out of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit that found the Delaware Psychiatric Center to be in violation of the Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead decision, which states that the unjustified segregation of persons with disabilities constitutes discrimination. Thanks to the Olmstead decision, many have transitioned from an institution to the community, and many have avoided long-term institu- tionalization all together. However, once in the community, individuals are quickly confronted by the legacies of red-lining and discrimination. Meager income, usually pulled from Social Security Disability Insurance, often locks them into a cycle of poverty where food insecurity, disruptions in healthcare, and evictions rapidly erode the conditions for health and wellness. These individuals have an average mortality rate that is 2-3 times higher than the general population, corresponding to a life expectancy shortened by 10-25 years. Even people lucky enough to secure housing will once again find them- selves segregated. Outside the confines of State-run facilities, and the reach of the Olmstead decision, advocates must wonder, does the letter of the law consider this justified segregation? The genesis stories of The Creative Vision Factory and the countless programs born out of the enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act often mask a hard truth, poignantly observed by the comedian Chris Rock when he asks, “You know what it means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would, but it’s against the law.’” Such is the all too common story of the disability rights movement. Each victory is incredibly hard fought. Due to a lack of political and economic will, each victory relies heavily on the inter- vention of the courts, and victory in the courts does not necessarily translate to action and compliance in the community. Under-resourced mental health programs serve as a flimsy infrastructure where the lived experience of peers forge supportive relationships. In a testament to human resilience, and the 1 imagination of artists working collectively, the Creative Vision Factory has managed to carve out a small zone of self-determination in the midst of these conditions. Of all the artists who have found a home in our studio, no one has taught our community more than Knicoma Frederick. In the following pages, University of Delaware faculty and longtime collaborators of the Creative Vision Factory, Dr. Yasser Payne and Dr. Anne Bowler, have contributed essays. Dr. Payne gives us a sense of the structural inequality built into the city that Knicoma has worked through and endured his entire adult life. Dr. Bowler, a cultural sociologist whose research focuses on aesthetic-cultural theory and the sociology of art, unpacks the cosmology of Knicoma’s WPIZ Justice and Judgement System. Upon accepting the Democratic nomination for President of the Unit- ed States, Vice President Joe Biden quoted the Irish poet Seamus Heaney: “’History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave, but then once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.’” Knicoma Frederick’s, “A New America” is an exhibition born out of the artist’s deep familiarity with the challenges of hope on this side of the grave. One can almost see the crest of the tidal wave looming over West Center City. If it ever rises to the task of rhyming history with Knicoma’s vision of hope, it will wash away the impulses to center the profits of developers, bankers, and the pharmaceutical industry. Systems of coercion will be defunded, and behav- ioral health outcomes will finally be driven by direct investments in employ- ment, housing, justice, and love. - Michael Kalmbach Founding Director, Creative Vision Factory 2 Untitled from The Series Maximum Overdrive 2018, marker and pen on paper, 8.5” x 11” 3 Wilmington: The City Where white Wealth and Black Poverty Collide Wilmington is a small city with a GIANT personality in Delaware. Crowned the “LLC,” “Chemical,” and “Corporate” capital of the US, Wilm- ington is truly a beacon of wealth, at least for some. The underbelly of this corporate leviathan, is its unspeakable poverty and vibrant street culture. Given this aspect of the city’s legacy, Wilmington was also dubbed the “Most Dangerous City in America”; “Murder Town USA”; and the capital for teenage homicide. Extreme Black poverty literally sits alongside extreme white wealth in this cantankerous town; and Wilmington’s smallness makes it impossible to escape this shameful reality. Higher-income whiter neighborhoods like Downtown Eastside, Trolley Square, and Cool Springs run alongside and in between poor Black communities like West Center City, Browntown, and the Northeast. White wealth gloriously thrives in Wilmington while thousands of Black bodies drown in structural violence. And all of this occurs in too normal of a fashion. Few people lose any sleep or appear to be disturbed by this obvious racialized divide in wealth. Just a few blocks away from Bank of America in the Eastside were some of the most ungodly levels of poverty sitting comfortably on 9th and North Pine Streets; 10th and Bennett Streets; or 9th and Lombard Streets. Wilmington’s population of 71,000 is nearly 60% Black and 32% white. Poverty rates for Blacks in some neighborhoods, like Riverside and some sections of the Eastside, exceed 60%. In fact, large numbers of Black families in these neighborhoods make less than $15,000 per year, and well over 60% of Black men in some of these same neighborhoods are unemployed. Given this structural context and depending on the year, Wilmington was either the third or fourth most violent city of its size, and its homicide per capita rates, are much higher than Philadelphia’s, Baltimore’s, Los Angeles’ and even Chicago’s rates. Violent crime and poverty generally had its way in small rustbelt cities like Wilmington. 4 As structurally violated as Black Wilmington is, most in these neighborhoods still have not lost hope. They stubbornly persist, inventing and reinventing the concept of resilience. The injustice they face, surprising- ly, emboldens and empowers them. What other choice did the people who were supposed to be forgotten have, then, to become a magnet for grass-roots organizing and transformation? Contrary to the dominant framing of Black Wilmington as “hopeless,” “listless,” and having “low self-esteem,” the people on the ground are anything but that, and instead run over with love and a pulsating pride that rears its head in every corner of the city. Whatever the cost and no matter what ‘they’ say, the people truly loved their city—even in the muck and stirred up structural violence designed to decimate them and their loved ones. Everyday people—the heart of Wilmington, are infatuated with preserving and partaking in their city’s untold legacy of honor, justice, and community. For some this was the Wilmington to be. But for others in- vested on the ground, this was always the city’s story. Revolution. Sincerely and in SOLIDARITY, Yasser Arafat Payne, Ph.D. 5 Untitled from The Series Fiery Road 2012, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 8.5” x 11” 6 KNICOMA FREDERICK: ART IS NOT A COMPROMISE₁ ANNE E. BOWLER DRAW PICTURES THAT SPEAK LOUDLY -80 Bit Knicoma Frederick (b. 1980) is a prolific artist whose drawings, paintings, and graphic novels juxtapose visions of a utopian universe where love and justice prevail with explosive battle scenes in which superheroes confront forces of evil intent on luring us into a passive acceptance of the status quo. Frederick’s cosmos does not, however, rest on formulaic notions of good and bad. Utopia is a place where a lusty, idiosyncratic version of female sexuality abounds and justice does not always triumph over evil. Frederick began work on 80 Bit, his first published book, in 2007. It is now in the permanent collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Since then, he has completed more than one hundred books, each consisting of a collection of interrelated images and text that range in length from twenty-five to over one hundred pages. Most of the books belong to broader series that form collections designated by the artist as libraries or museums. All of the work, including his more recent large-scale acrylic paintings on canvas, are part of an overarching entity known as WPIZ, described by Frederick as a “justice and judgment system” presided over by a pantheon of superheroes who, equipped with special powers, wage a tireless battle against the injustices of the world. WPIZ enables viewers to see that things in the world are not always what they seem on the surface, to distinguish the real from the fake. “Do not regard everything to be truth,” he states in the introduction to The Yellow House Museum of Art. Indeed, Frederick’s work reveals dark truths lurking beneath the most prosaic aspects of everyday life: corporate greed, govern- ment corruption, and social indifference to the landscape of human suffering produced by widespread poverty, systemic racism, hunger, and homeless- ness. Images of hearts riven by jagged lines, hypodermic needles and pills offering the false promise of relief, hands reaching upward for goods that remain permanently out of grasp, and the recurring face of a young girl in pigtails who bears poignant witness to the violence and destruction that sur- rounds her offer an unsparing window into the breadth and depth of anguish that marks the lives of those failed by the American Dream.

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