“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 dis- crimination. 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 art- ist’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, paint- ings, 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. The redemptive power of art that sits at the center of the universe Frederick has created with WPIZ lies in its ability to not only critique but

7 also enlighten and transform. Viewers are invited to use the pictures, in any number or combination, to find resolution to the pressing issues they face in their lives – to, in the artist’s words, “square things off” without resorting to harm to themselves or others, so that “the things that have happened in people’s lives, over and over and over, can stop, break the cycle.”₂ Frederick’s work asks us to imagine a world where basic human needs are met and the dignity of every individual is honored. His dollar drawings – which function as actual currency within the WPIZ system – call to mind the AfriCOBRA collective’s call in the late 1960s for “images that mark the spot where the real and the overreal, the plus and the minus, the abstract and the concrete—the reel and the replete meet.”₃ Money for food and housing, money for “loving care” and respect. The drawings invite us to question why the premise of a society where such fundamental needs are satisfied is so often regarded as an impossible ideal. If comic art is the most immediate stylistic influence on Freder- ick’s paintings and drawings, a closer examination of his oeuvre reveals a wide-ranging visual vocabulary that includes imagery derived from landscape painting and the traditional still life, formal portraiture, African masks, Roman statuary, contemporary advertising, and the New Testament. At the same time, it is Frederick’s tendency to subvert the conventional meaning of his stylistic choices. An idyllic seascape appears on the back of a woman’s bikini bottom, a pair of Rubenesque buttocks is placed atop an Ionic pedes- tal, an arrangement of fruit spills out of a pharmaceutical capsule discharged from a small plane displaying a banner that reads, “For what a– man sows, that shall he also reap.” The social commentary in Frederick’s work and man- ifesto-like tone that characterizes much of his written text make it tempting to position him in the tradition of the avant-garde. Frederick interrogates the present as a way of imagining the possibility of a different future. Yet despite the visionary quality of his work, he actively resists the didactic character of that tradition, insisting that the meaning of the work must be left up to the viewer. Justice, in Frederick’s hands, is inextricably linked to an ethic of the right to self-determination and respect for others.

₁Knicoma Frederick, information 1600 (2012). ₂Quotes from “Knicoma Frederick – WPIZ Master” (2012) https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=TiUrP6mx0nw ₃Jeff R. Donaldson, “AfriCOBRA Manifesto? ‘Ten in Search of a Nation,’” Journal of Contemporary African Art 30 (Spring 2012): 76-83.

8 Untitled from The Series Channel A (One Billion Dollars) 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 48”

9 Untitled from The Series Channel A (Book of Righteousness) 2020, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 48”

10 Untitled from The Series Channel A (Key to LIfe) 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72” x 60”

11 Untitled from The Series Channel A (Afro) 2020, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 30”

12 Untitled from The Series Channel A (Time) 2020, acrylic on canvas, 36” x 36”

13 Untitled from The Series Channel A (Much Needed Rain) 2020, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 30”

14 Untitled from The Series Electronic Liar 2014, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 8.5” x 11”

15 Untitled from The Series Fiery Road 2012, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 8.5” x 11”

16 Untitled from The Series Fiery Road 2012, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 8.5” x 11”

17 Untitled from The Series Road Of Righteousness 2012, marker and pen on paper, 8.5” x 11”

18 Untitled from The Series Road Of Righteousness 2013, marker and pen on paper, 8.5” x 11”

19 Untitled from The Series Die Evil 81 2012, marker and pen on paper, 8.5” x 11”

20 Untitled from The Series For The Love Of Good 2013, watercolor and pencil on paper, 8.5” x 11”

21 Untitled from The Series Fiery Road 2012, marker and pen on paper, 8.5” x 11”

22 Untitled from The Series Channel A (Marry Your Girlfriend) 2019, acrylic on canvas, 72” x 60” Pulled from A New America to be included in the group exhibition, Touching from a Distance, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, September 17- November 7, 2020.

23 Acknowledgments: Art exhibitions are a testament to the labors of many, and Knicoma Frederick’s “A New America” is no exception. It would be impossible to thank everyone who has carried the torch for Knicoma’s art over the years, but the enthusiasm of curators like Alex Baker and Margaret Winslow expanded our audience right out of the gate. The early support of local collector Barry Schlecker lent us a ton of social capital, and ultimately led to our collabora- tions with the artist, and world’s coolest neighbor, Nancy Josephson. The Creative Vision Factory community is blessed with a host of supporters and collaborators at the University of Delaware. We’d like to thank Dr. Anne Bowler and Dr. Yasser Payne, not only for their contributions to this catalog, but for their ability to develop and nurture scholars committed to inclusion and justice. When Yasser and Anne are in your corner every student they ever advised is also in your corner. Out of all our champions at the University of Delaware, Dr. David Kim’s digital archive promises to have the most endur- ing impact on the legacy of the Creative Vision Factory. With support from Dr. Julie McGee’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, the CVF digital archive has not only given us a platform to document the artistic pro- duction of our artists, but it has given us a tool to collaborate with University of Delaware students for years to come. The work accomplished by the Creative Vision Factory would not be possible without the continued financial support of the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health (DSAMH). Our work in Delaware stands on the shoulders of many. Former DSAMH Director, Kevin Ann Huckshorn, and former Health and Social Services Secretary, Rita Landgraf wouldn’t be able to take credit for establishing our program were it not for the tireless ad- vocacy of Allen Conover, Penny Chelucci, and Gayle Bluebird. We’re forever grateful for their leadership and vision. This catalog was made possible by the generous support of the University of Delaware’s Partnership for Arts and Culture.

Creative Vision Factory email: [email protected] 617 N Shipley Street web: http://cvf.digitalwilmington.com Wilmington, DE 19801 Instagram: @creativevisionfactory PH: 302-397-8472 Photography credit: David Heitur Design credit: Francisco Madera Legislator credit: Senator Lockman