The End-to-End Effort of Creative Labor Within the generic notion of “creativity” a maker includes operator (assembler/processor), producer (enabler/developer), and of course creator (conceiver, author). Yet while those distinctions are co-equally important to our understanding, we readily observe that in action they have a lot of things in common. Recently, creativity has again been forced into new reckoning by the evolution of technology. Now, AI extends the arc mapped at least by the camera, the audio synthesizer, and computer graphics. Those developments each called into question the distinction between tools as machines and tools as instruments. We also long ago accepted that machine automations can produce both desirable and undesirable products and can occupy the role of “operator”. But we rarely if ever cast them in the role of “creator” because we attribute to them no autonomous “intent”. There is no question that all three roles do work that generates a known output (thing) and outcome (condition). But seen as what they respectively bring to work, each role has responsibilities that exist outside of the “Creator”. All the major ingredients of autonomous intent – motive, decisions, purpose – remain part of our specific distinguishing definition of creator. Meanwhile, the Creator role is fundamentally the same across the wide range of disciplines and mediums. It is a distinctive way of making, both philosophically and practically. As art-making, the work in the role (“vision” and “execution”) is based throughout the effort in aesthetic decisions. Aesthetics - the principles governing the creation, expression, and appreciation, of sensory perception, including how individuals interpret, value, and emotionally engage with such forms as experience.

The conventional notion of scoring is to mark a surface in a way that the marks indicate both the presence of the manipulator with the surface and within the surface. If the surface is time, the marking spotlights selected moments. In the selection of moments, the mark applies a sensory signal to the moment. The signals collectively materialize time. The material then becomes a way to form time, while simultaneously time becomes a way to seek and locate material. Form encodes time and reading decodes the form. A Morphology of Coding Get the project notebook:

El Gallo’s FALSE GODS at The Grand Gallery September 1 – 30, 2026 We walk off a sunny Jack London Square sidewalk through the front door of The Grand Gallery and are immediately embraced by the theater of its new central installation, a Gothic tour by El Gallo. Whatever your mood was on the way in, the exhibit’s four large oil on canvas scenes interrupt it and take over. For many of us the show’s images of industrial-strength power have a seductive familiarity and strangeness; their definitive craftwork makes them oddly hyper-real while variously invoking the steampunk suffocation of Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard’s Brasil; the suspicious irrationality of MC Escher’ Ascending and Descending; or the hallucinatory authority of the Wizard of Oz. But I’ve always said that terror is the fear of the unknown, and that horror is worse, the fear of the known. The purpose of these works is to survey violence, especially the violence that we perpetrate on ourselves. The works readily trigger the matter-of-fact sociopathic treachery of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the grim overt documentary of Nazi genocide. Executed roughly five years apart – from 2011 to 2025 – each of the four paintings vividly contrasts the portrayal of people who use violence as the Solution, and those who are considered to be the Problem. They each anchor a chapter of a narrative across the inhuman deification of power, through its militarization, industrialization, socialization, and final shocking humanization. But despite an implied historical evolution across time, we realize that none of these works are old news: they are all contemporary status reports. The compositional aesthetics of the four works help to bring them all together with equal currency. The featured colors establish deathliness with bluish grays, and some left-over liveliness in pinks or ambers. Skulls, gas masks, or aliens have a common presence in their antipathy and vacant stares. In the pictured environments, liquid pools – normally the source of life – are near certainly toxic. Backgrounds are environments, unnamed spaces. Even the frames of the pieces work hard and explicitly: two ornate frames ironically glorify their fantastic scenes with faux permanence; but two modernist frames argue for the realism of their message despite our reluctance to believe. Putting contrasts on equal footing is a strategic element within the scenes as well. One can’t miss the rigorous horizontal symmetry of each painting, enforcing the idea that even where we think we have options or differences – left versus right – they are subsumed in a greater sameness. But embedded in that is also El Gallo’s main story, one about the powerful consuming the weaker, with no other regard for the weak, and strictly for the lust of the stronger. The painter amplifies this dynamic in a recurring schema where the upper half of the image is a ravenous creature plundering the helpless in the lower half. As a result, we can see the group of four works as a pantheon of threats; or we can see them as four faces of the same timeless and malevolent force. Spotting AI in 2020, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, El Gallo’s vigilance raises a question, one perhaps now more rhetorical than profound but far more than a cocktail party icebreaker. Did the isolation and dependency on the internet actually increase, permanently, both the pace and attraction of abdicating our autonomy to automation? But in 2025, the painter gives us the most humanoid of all the villains. We get skin and eyes, and a full-frontal stare; a portrait; the naïve arrogance of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. While that differently dramatizes the convention that El Gallo has created, the paintings finally work in common in a more sinister way. At the midpoint of each, there is a fairly inconspicuous small figure who might be seen as the Dreamer, the mastermind, of the much larger and overwhelming presence in the top and background of each work. It is not difficult to ask, who is that figure today and what should be done about him? As Walt Kelly has said in his famous comic Pogo, we have seen the enemy, and he is us. Bill Weber, also known as El Gallo, is an established California-based muralist and painter who has been creating public art and fine art since 1974. His meticulous oil paintings and surrealist visions use classic layering techniques to explore dystopian themes that critique industrialization, government corruption, and a decaying society.

Oakland Photo Workshop’s 5th Anniversary Celebration The DeYoung Museum’s triennial “Open” is a target for thousands of Bay Area artists, and because of its process, the 2023 edition featured 137 photographers, as of this writing still shown on the exhibit’s website. We’re of course interested in how many were included in the 2020 Open – during the COVID Era: the exhibition overall received 11,514 submissions from 6,200 applicants in a two-week period in June 2020, eventually selecting 877 works by 762 artists. From various records such as gallery layouts and installation overviews, photography represented an estimated 15% to 20% of the exhibition, translating to roughly 130 to 175 works hung among the total selections. That show became a direct visual chronicle of 2020. Works prominently explored themes of quarantine, domestic confinement, remote work via Zoom, grief, frontline workers, and the concurrent racial justice uprisings following the murder of George Floyd. By 2023, practitioners in the Open emerged along broadened lines. Rather than grouping pieces by medium, the Open’s chief curator and jury organized the 883 works into emergent thematic galleries that reflected Bay Area life and current global dialogues. Climate Crisis & Altered Landscapes: Photographers frequently engaged with environmental shifts and ecology, ranging from wildfire and drought imagery to arboreal documentation of aging regional flora. Global Conflicts & Sociopolitical Realities: photographic works addressed ongoing international and domestic events, including responses to global conflicts (Ukraine, the Middle East), post-pandemic recovery, and political polarization. Cultural Identity, Community & Portraiture: Numerous photographers focused on intimate human connection, cross-cultural heritage, and local communities Urban Environment & Ephemera: Bay Area street life, architectural textures, transit, and typographic interventions explored the changing character of regional cities. Formal Abstraction & Perceptual Studies: A significant cohort of photographers moved away from documentary realism toward non-representational minimalism, high-contrast black-and-white studies, geometric spatial divisions, and experimental light refractions. Even more interesting, therefore, is that three years later in 2026, and before the next DeYoung Open, Bay Area photographers were already able to submit and show works to a similar regional show: “In Focus: A Survey of Bay Area Photography", now showing at Oakland Photo Workshop. While In Focus is EBPCO’s first regional survey, its gallery has mounted several other more specific juried and group open calls since opening in 2021: Thematic Juried Open Calls: The Night Is Young (2022), a 22-artist juried exhibition focusing on nighttime photography. Medium & Process Surveys: the Film Swap Show & Tell retrospective (2023), and Refractions: A Lenticular Exhibition (2024) Annual Member Surveys: All-member juried showcases, including Where Would I Be Without You? (2022) and Food with a Twist (2021/2022). Through September 13th, the current OPW show “In Focus” brings together 50 artists in the gallery and an additional 30 artists in an expanded online exhibition – a total of 80 -- highlighting what it advertises as the many ways photography can document, question, connect, and inspire. MAKING OPEN WIDE Despite the example of earlier show themes, those four modes are, frankly, more interesting than the usual emphasis on subject matter categories. Like themes, they pull the mentality of the photographer into the foreground, making the motivation for the works a stronger shared concern with the viewer. But without prescribing themes beforehand, the exhibition is literally more “open” to how the discipline itself is practiced. Being a juried show naturally makes the included works somewhat special; but even more value is offered by the opportunity to display the pictures at OPW without their being swamped by the 500 or so works in other mediums that at the DeYoung corner photography in less direct lines of sight and traffic. And at the same time, EBPCO’s infamous dedication to film photography (which of course means prints) did not suppress alternative techniques -- ranging from antiques to digital to collage -- holding wall space on par with the more conventional methods. Finally, a special ingredient of the show is its two-staged orchestration featuring a virtual conversation between juror Ann Jastrab, , who made the selections; and OPW curator Jyoti Liggin of Oakland’s EBPCO, who arranged and hung the show. Jastrab featured at RayKo for ten years prior to joining the Center for Photographic Arts in Carmel (CPA) in 2019 as its Director. It’s fair to assume she has perused for decades many of the things that Liggin's decisions help bring forward. SEEING IT HAPPEN As a juror for a survey, one has at least two strong motivations: both the chance to confirm hunches, and the chance of discovering something unexpected. Then, as a curator, Liggin took both. While Jastrab’s selections were not given over to Liggin in categories, we get to join with Liggin searching for correspondences among them that presume they will highlight how photographers are seeing life today. But instead, what happens at the gallery exhibit is a tour of what makes imaging “photographic” – and that is the real signature concern of this survey. One such finding is the ever-present interest in formalism and even drawing, making the most explicit use of the boundary of the frame. These interests do the most to make the photograph into a standalone object, actually presenting itself as a design at least as much as, if not more than, representing something else. Photo: Wilfred Galila, But only god can make a tree On a quite different tack, one adjacent pair of image groups emphasizes how we inhabit spaces while being alone, segueing into how we move through them. These together are far more like theater than most of the other works. Photo: Dante Calcagno, Roller Rink Photo: Chris Fiorentini, Paletero Another grouping appears to be images in memoriam, ranging across recalling specific people or places now from points past or far away. Photo: Carl Weingarten, The Memory Shade One more grouping includes a combination, if not juxtaposition, of people as portraits or as icons, bringing a sense of role-playing being as meaningful as any other presentation of identity. Photo: Rikki Ward, Cuervo with his mules, Slab City, 2017 And finally for now, there is a generous supply of collage, montage and mixed media, poetic inventions of the scene Photomontage/handmade paper: Becky Jaffe, California Dreaming Tableau/Photography Collage: Stephen Albair, Self-Portrait Thanks to OPW’s production team, the gallery show of 50 works easily facilitates doing one’s own curating as well, an exercise made even more inviting by all 80 selections being together online: https://www.ebpco.org/exhibitions/online/in-focus. Numerous entries there include notes by the artist, bringing more clarity to the motivations and meanings behind the work. Prompted by those, and by the demonstration of Liggin's installation at OPW, we are further inspired to browse the works in many different ways, exploring how photography can document, question, connect, and inspire. [All images above: copyright of their respective artists.]

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2026 Spoiler Alert. In another fine mix of painting, photography and a splash of 3D work, curator Jan Watten at Gray Loft Gallery wraps a summer show about water with a deceptively simple title, Surface Tension. Naturally this throws us back to a few things: insects that magically skate on a lake; the mystery of what holds bubbles together, and our faces breaking into the air from our strokes under the deep end of a pool. These appreciations all dramatize, although not excitedly, our encounters with water. But here in the meditative space of the Gallery, the tension is not really between the differing ways that the art works show water or make us think about it. After all, there is little in life that, across so many reasons and occasions, is already so familiar to us as is water. Nor is the tension due to whether we find one style or scene more engaging than another; one style of portrayal is not better than another. Practically all of the works are both evocative and provocative in some way; each work has a meaning both as memory and as the immediate moment, and intentionally, they do not conflict. Rather, I think that the tension comes from two other things. One, nearly all of the 2D works are scenic. We can say about them that - shaped, tangible, and portable - they are containers… they each have carried water from someplace else, numerous slices of reality brought to us here. There is intensity in the selectivity that each artist exerted in deciding what to put into their respective containers. And so there is by definition great specificity on display; yet it is all no less universal. It is the standard modus operandi of variations-on-a-theme, and the arrangement of the works performs a balancing act throughout the exhibit space. And two, as we continue viewing, it becomes clear that the artists have not simply used light to show the water or its known materiality or its ubiquity. Instead, in these works, when light is seen, the water is the light. “Water as liquid light…” It’s a thought that subordinates water’s metaphor and memories to its immediate role in creating the image. There is plenty of description going on in the pictures. But as things made and offered by the artist, what is visible in the works is there because the water put it there. Then, in that same moment, the light that is there “reads as” water. We pick this up directly in Jan Watten’s own piece, as if she had given us all the cheat code to the rest of the show… Photo: Jan Watten, Reflections - Lake Tahoe In other pieces, following suit, there is the elegant “brushwork” of Michael Scandling’s ethereal white-on-black photo. Photo: Michael Scandling. Latourell Now, far differently, John Wood's colorful hyper-graphic abstraction deftly argues another way that light reads as water in his work. We get it from his title and have an "Aha!" moment. Looking nothing alike, Wood and Scandling both understand the same thing: once again, water gives light behavior. Consistently, the artist’s rendition has not frozen that behavior; rather, in the art work, water is the light that plays across the surface of the work. Mixed Media: John Wood, Midafternoon Reflections In the end, while being indisputably generous with us emotionally, this show is a show about art. The tension is between the stillness of the light in the “container” that is the work, and the dynamism of the artist’s actions that used the water to put the light where it is. Ultimately, these objects celebrate the aesthetic materiality of the subject more than the psychological; and down the road from now that is what I think we will remember distinguishes this show. [All images above: copyright of their respective artists.]

Economic support of the Arts continues to be under-prioritized, inadequate, and aspirational in an environment of fierce competition with political trends and sufficient provision of human services. The issue is not, however, that the Arts are deemed weak or unimportant to decision-making in those areas. The real issue is that, without a track record of impacts that clearly enhance those two areas in a predictably consistent way, the Arts are seen as optional except for those who will make art regardless. The most important response to this is to explicitly account for how the presumptive "ecosystem" of the arts environmental) is actually a System (architectural). In that way, the Arts are not seen as something that is improving some other system; rather, a system is designed such that it continually generates the productivity of art-making beyond a critical threshold of Return-On-Investment (ROI). The ROI perspective entirely displaces the Subsidy perspective as the orientation of strategic planning. This point of view immediately calls up a recognition of what sources of money are active investors. Systemic economic inputs. (c) 2026 Malcolm Ryder With that economic input, effects of the system dynamics build sustainability by being inherently regenerative: The measurable outcomes constitute the environment, and the environment fosters confidence in benefits arising from collaboration and synergies. Additionally, the system is open to more and various contributors who essentially add energy into the system without imbalancing it. The full specification of this approach is a solution architecture, described in the following document: Archestra Research continues to scan arts regions such as the East Bay in California for past and present examples of efforts and impacts that now logically map to the system model as dynamically effective candidate contributors.

It’s mid-2026, and the industrialized world is absorbing almost daily shocks from the hyper-speed of AI development. It’s the latest epochal change in work since the internet got real for everyone. This is perhaps why the exhibition of photographs about work, unveiled April 3rd at Oakland Photo Workshop, seems to reach backwards almost farther than nostalgia. It features industry still literally beyond the reach of automation, highlighting what must be done by hand. But for many viewers it shows that being done in places they rarely if ever have been or will go. That distance toys with how we see the work: raising the question of whether the portrayed task, soon enough, is antiquated or instead timeless. Also because of the distance, sometimes the work we see in the pictures is almost like a display of an alien culture. – tasks that accomplish an effect far exceeding the scale of the personal labor, but the effect is not very obvious to anyone other than who is doing the task. This intrigues because the task itself seems exotic; implying no narrative of cause and effect. Other times, however, this group of photographers frames views in a way that the work needs no labeling; the task in scene is a moment that leads to something entirely familiar to us, and the labor is something that is not specialized but simply necessary. It is a kind of task, however, almost never celebrated. In other words, as advertised, the show is built on noticing things that often lie beyond either our awareness or care. But this includes both the exotic and the mundane. A few of the group's photos stand as exceptions to those two strains. For example, in one, the photo is the sole image of a worker being managed by another one - doing something somewhat inscrutable that makes the mystery task seem really critical. A second image is the only picture of a busy team, highlighting the immediate burden of the task. These two pictures add a layer of the energy that is felt in cooperation. Their views stress the workers attending to each other's work as much as they do to their own. All of the other pictures have an unfiltered focus on the worker watching what they're doing themselves. In each case, the connection of the mind, eye, and hand sets the moment up as being nearly dramatic; no one is on “autopilot” in their effort, so not only do we feel they derive great satisfaction from dignifying the work with quality – but their attentiveness means that they are valuable to whoever comes along as the customer or user. Overall, the sense of the show is that we’re watching people with scalpels, not axes; we keep coming back to their hands. That steeps the views in a kind of intimacy that, being a familiar feeling, helps us imagine ourselves, however briefly, in their roles.

Vincent Valdez's Historical Truth When Vincent Valdez was  app r oached in 2023 by Arion Press to  imagine h i s next project, the publisher and the artist were actual l y  continu i ng  an ongoing conversation ,  one  that led to his selection as Arian's first King  Residency a r t i st i n residence .  The project they picked for the residency? Kurt Vonnegut ' s meditation on the catastrophic impact of war, Slaughterhouse-Five. The core  of  Va l dez ' s oe u v r e  i s  hi s m i ssion to dispel what he  calls  " social amnesia " - moments when we as t h e p u bl i c beco m e d i sta n ced from ve ri fiable realit i es by a n unprecedented prevalence of dis i nfor m at i on and cu l tural  polarization. (Sound familia r ?) We must, Valdez believes , recognize and reject that distance . In  contrast to much photography and  high-fidelity representational  painting, Valdez's meticulous creations in hand-drawn  ink have  the  special quality of  amplifying  our awareness of his effort.  His  drawing  registers  as a speech act, a testimony that, when complete, has the force of a single clear  idea .  As we dwell on it  and take in  the details, we increasingly  try to retrace his steps in getting it done. As a result, our extended attention becomes focused concentration, and we can feel ourselves working with him on the  creation of the image - said differently, of having a realization. The feeling is both  like recalling  a memory and making a discovery. It tells us what we might already know, but immediately compares what he sees to what we see in our minds. The Brooklyn Rail  notes that Valdez  "creates images as instruments to probe the past in order to reveal an  immediacy to what is occurring today, and to remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras." Valdez's probing highlights the way we experience the world from multiple perspectives, sometimes reconciling the differences but not always .  And when we act on life from some given perspective, we are not always ready, willing, or able to include the others. Meanwhile, the consequences of our actions are in their own way convincing. The result: truth can be illusory, b u t al so t hat truth ca n s i mply be w ha t  w e  have n o t lo o k ed fo r h a r d enou gh  o r l ooked a t hard en ough . W it ne s ses m ake t he diffe re nc e, a n d Va ld e z is a n enl i ghten i ng w i tness . Va l dez creat e d images for Arian's edition of  Slaughterhouse - Five  that link Vonnegut ' s shifting "realities " of Billy Pilgrim's experience to Valdez ' s own sensibility about the challenge to the i nd i vidual ' s sense - making effort in life .  The suite of images , collectively , both review the life in Vonnegut's text and compare it to Valdez's awareness , an awareness is drawn from his own experience . The drawings explore Billy Pilgrim's fictional life from various perspectives; Valdez's draw i ngs reiterate selected things for more of our at t ention, and they also comment on how we pay attention . The observation ranges var i ously across the imagined versus the real; the mundane versus the trag i c; the i ntimate versus the public; the rational versus the absurd. Published in 1969 as  Slaughterhouse - Five, or , The Ch i ldren's Crusade: A Duty - Dance with Death, Vonnegut's novel has enjoyed notoriety and great influence in v i sual media before, especially with the 1972 film version directed by George Roy Hill. Vincent Valdez's fresh achievement is in bringing its interpretation and original format fully into the present. His interpretation is enormously enhanced by Arion’s handmade artistry. From the type to the paper to the slipcases (including an aluminum casing in Army green for the Deluxe edition), the edition gives us a new way to experience the novel and hints at its moral clarity and enduring relevance.

March 2026 The storefront entrance to The Grand Gallery in Oakland’s Jack London Square features a display space having a character somewhat like an amphitheater. And in the current exhibit held by it, the effect is especially apropos as its featured works restage the early 1960’s East Bay of the critical protest period of the Free Speech Movement and more. At The Grand Gallery These are classic black-and-white photographs laid out in three sections. The left section powerfully iterates “home” in West Oakland. Its numerous scenes, with framing that isolates as well as crystalizes, sit right on the line between each resident possessing perhaps the only space they have or being possessed by it. We see conditions that poignantly say “Doing Without” in a timeless way, but in the context of the whole show they ask “Why?” We easily reflect on a no-win scenario in which today there are forces that create these conditions and there are forces that simply bulldoze it all away. In the center section the shots move us from the first group’s private individual spaces into the public space of Berkeley, and they time-stamp all of the other pictures. In classic witness  posture, the photographer has selectively recorded the high-energy mixed society of non-violent protesters, its diversity spanning gender, ethnicity, occupation, and class. In these shots, the business of being a protester – from the artifacts to occupying space to the body language – is vivid in no small part due to it being archetypal, showing us much of what we see now 60 years later in the wave of federal pursuit of non-legal immigrants spilling over into civilian grounds. Harawitz portfolio online at http://harawitz.com . The third section, at the right, contrasts with the first while also suggesting that the three sections together have, from left to right, a narrative arc. Arguably illustrating no one town or site, they are made up mainly of photos of friendships, perhaps lovers, and perhaps families, showing human bonding and dignity in a milieu far more comfortable –  as if depicting the victorious outcome of the prior strife shown and related efforts to overcome it. Being outside of most of Harawitz’s work that made him historically important in the journalistic genre, this third group attests to his individual personal sensibility. But as viewers standing virtually in his shoes, we get a vibe from these pictures that is part optimism, and part echo of what our own experiences have done to underline our personally shared humanity. In effect, they show us what is at stake in each of the first two groupings. Curated from thousands of photographs in Harawitz’s library, this is the first time that these particular pictures have been formed into a singular exhibit – selectivity accomplished  as a partnership between husband and wife, painter Cheryl Gillett. Broader collections of his work appeared at a 2025 solo show in Albany where they now live. Meanwhile, a comprehensive survey of his pictures is readily available on his website http://harawitz.com . We leave this show not only looking for more of his work but also with a plan to study two of his most notable contemporaries of the period: Nacio Jan Brown, who documented the anti-war movement and counterculture in the Bay Area for the  San Francisco Express Times , and Dennis Stock, known for documenting the California counterculture during the 1960s in his work, California Trip .

Richmond Art Center’s 2026 Art of the African Diaspora exhibit. By definition, a diaspora involves movement across space and time. Also, by definition, an event about the art of a diaspora involves people bringing culture across space and time. And in the Richmond Arts Center’s annual event – titled Art of the African Diaspora  – the criteria for participating makes identity a prerequisite consideration of what will appear in the diasporic pathways. But none of the above predefines the actual artwork or confines it to only one prescribed socialization of culture. In the diaspora, time and place make definite impacts on what moves through them. Environments and conditions are inhibitors on impulses and intentions, just as much as they are inspirations. And to the extent that personality is cultivated in those influences, individuals will differ from each other because of where they are and have been. This generates a broad perspective on the collection of art works created within the diaspora. In the historical context of the diaspora, the Richmond Art Center’s event hosts a vitally important congregation. Fostered now for 30 years, it regularly uncovers the rising, resilient, ambitious community of artists in one of the most far-flung destinations of the African diaspora, the California Bay Area.** That group  of works – all sharing an ancestry –  can “evolve” over time, driven by the intent of each of the makers at their respective times. For any individual artist, is the intent of the work to celebrate, philosophize, or critique? Is it to preserve, adapt, or innovate? And what becomes the compelling attraction in the work for other people within the diaspora? What kind of embrace does the culture offer through the artist’s effort: is it tradition, or soul, or consciousness? Considering all the possible combinations of resources, motives, and attractions, the big message about the true nature of the diaspora is that it cultivates diversity  as the way culture stays relevant. That diversity is not just about the impressive range of mediums a visitor encounters when attending the Art of the African Diaspora exhibit. It's all visual art, but it broadly spans 2D and 3D works, well represented on the event’s online gallery of artists. Below is a look at how, within the Richmond on-land show, even just one medium and subject – painted faces , or identities – contains the breadth of variations that an artist can incorporate resulting in the “flavor” of the work: a wide variety of intents, motives, attractions, and more. Message: within commonality, differences refine meaning. For example, clockwise from the top left , these seven works* show a progression beginning in a more naturalistic representation but gradually increasing in abstraction on the way to the bottom left. Within that kind of difference, an artist’s piece has perhaps “captured” an identity, while another instead “constructed” one. And in doing that, the works use figures in various ways to indicate culture, sometimes simply depicting, and otherwise more symbolically. Meanwhile, the visually simpler images like the first two eliminate most of anything non-essential, leaving a face that is potentially more universally representative. In comparison, the more complex ones like the fifth and sixth suggest that the sense of “self” is always a work in progress, or even a performance. Along the way, we don’t know if any of these are specifically “portraits”; but we don’t need to know: despite their specific differences, the faces all have in common an iconic  presence. Within that commonality, we might take each particular picture’s apparent mood as a reflection of our inner selves  – a reflection as seen either by ourselves or by others. Or instead, the work might appear to be a snapshot of an outward personality , an example of how some people want to be seen. Further, in that duality of inner and outer selves, each face on display can be taken as either a celebration of who we already are, or an exploration of what we might like to be. In short, these variations of faces not only have differing meanings, they also end up emphasizing artists’ wide-ranging approaches to forming meanings. Recognizing the nature of creativity that way, it is easy to understand that there is plenty of room for tradition, adaptation and innovation in this exhibit of the community. Overall, we get to reflect on the famous phrase attributed to Henry Louis Gates: “ There never was one way to be Black. There are 42 million African Americans. There are 42 million ways to be Black .” - Malcolm Ryder   Notes: © 2026 Malcolm Ryder “Flava in Ya Eye” title  inspired by " Flava in Ya Ear ", a song by American rapper Craig Mack released on July 2, 1994 Map illustrations  newly generated by the author via AI from multiple knowledge bases. * Artist credits/copyrights  clockwise from the top left: Hellen; Desola; Zoe Boston; Karla Lawson; K. Dollar-Dickerson; Malik Seneforu; Shawn Sanders ** Scheduling and location details  of the Richmond Art of the African Diaspora events through April are found and updated at Aotad.org

With generative digital imaging, the panic is on about photography. That doesn't need to happen.

The point of creating forms is to make an idea communicable or to make that idea persistent enough to use, continuously or repeatedly, over time. The use of the form is what gives it meaning. "Usage" includes intentionally experiencing the form whenever that is relevant to a need or desire. Naturally, issues such as which form is "the right one" for the usage are basic here. But what makes a form "right", due to its availability and effectiveness, is the distinctive way that availability and effect are preferred in the specific occasion. While that is equally true for builders, designers, and composers, the following pertains to making text or images. See six varieties of preference here: Aside from pure accident or coincidence, the use of the chosen form exploits the form's exposed characteristics to generate an intended conceptual and emotional reaction to their presentation. That reaction may, at one extreme, be "first-and-only-time" (original and unique); at the other extreme it may be entirely "tried-and-true" (learned and conventional). Either way, it is the immediate exposure and experience of the form that originates "meaning" (the distinctive importance) compared to all other occasions of experience -- whether in comparison the meaning is different or similar. Typically, we then associate the meaning with the form. That association can happen at least because the experience has a pattern that matches a pattern of the form -- but entirely differently from that, it may happen simply because we decide to agree and rehearse making a certain association as a rule. Individuals can choose how it happens, but groups can also decide how it happens. This accounts for how a given form could have a uniquely private meaning decided by a person, or a largely public meaning decided socially or culturally. But underlying both is the same range of ways that meaning is recognized.