"Unfortunately in our community, the role model is the athlete. Of course I grew up around sports. But my parents exposed me to a world bigger than sports. Unfortunately people don't see that there are other worlds out there. I've met Africa-American students who simply weren't aware there were African-American artists. ... I want to show young people that there are successful people doing other things beside putting a ball through a hoop, or rapping or acting. Not everyone's going to get it. Not everyone's going to start looking at art. I'd like to see kids being exposed to a whole range of things."
"It's more than an irony. For a lot of kids, particularly African-American kids, the only people who've been put in front of them are athletes and entertainers -- and athletes really are entertainers. Here's an opportunity for Grant to show people they could be like Romare Bearden. Grant is not an artist, he has no artistic skill. But he has the capacity to tell others to look at other role models because he is a basketball player. He's aware of that. I see it as him seeing the power of the modern young athlete to do more than entertain us. We have to get over the myth that everyone who's African-American can act, sing, dance and dunk."
| A quote from Grant Hill, and another quote from his mother Janet, in art critic Doug MacCash's New Orleans Times-Picayune article "Art & Basketball" on "Something All Our Own: The Grant Hill Collection of African-American Art," which will spend two months in the New Orleans Museum of Art alongside its "Power on Paper: African-American Works on Paper from the New Orleans Museum of Art" exhibit
posted in articles on April 9, 2004 1:26 AM | t (0)
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