Sydney G. James beams with Detroit pride in MOCAD solo show
FROM THE DETROIT METRO TIMES
By Randiah Camille Green, April 12, 2023
Sydney G. James is getting ready to unveil her new exhibition Girl Raised in Detroit. It’s the first solo show by a Black woman in MOCAD’s largest space, the Woodward Gallery. Image courtesy of Detroit Metro Times & Lamar Landers.
Before I can hit send on my “I’m here” text, Sydney G. James is already stepping off the porch of her Eastside Detroit home and approaching my car.
“We’re going to the church. You’ll see why when we get there,” the 5-foot-4 artist with freckles like constellations says, tossing the empty bottles riding shotgun to the back seat.
Around the corner at Conant Avenue United Methodist Church, her mother and childhood friend are busy at work. They hunch over 15-by-8-foot tapestries that James painted for her upcoming solo show, tidying the edges and lining them with a gold trim fit for a queen’s gown.
James’s show Sydney G. James: Girl Raised in Detroit is about to debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s spring-summer exhibitions on April 14. The show features nine new pieces with two installations and a mural. It’s the finishing stretch before the show opens and her crew is helping with the finishing touches.
James grew up here in Conant Gardens, one of the first places in Detroit where Black people were allowed to buy and build their own homes. The 43-year-old painter went to this church as a kid but makes sure to tell me that she’s agnostic now. Her Detroit pride is rooted in this neighborhood, and she has no plans to move.
“I own my house and I live four blocks away from my mama,” she says. “My dad moved to Conant Gardens when he was 12 and helped my grandfather build their house in ’48 or ’49. My dad was a foreman for the city and we would drive all around and he’d have a story for every corner... Think about it, Detroit is the epitome of Blackness in its fullness. Why would I want to live anywhere else?”
The mural-sized paintings inside the church are so tall, one has to be laid across several tables pushed together. I recognize one of the painted faces with glistening pierced lips and earlobes hanging low under the force of their ear weights. It’s the Detroit painter, and one of James’ many mentees, Bakpak Durden.
“That’s my baby,” James says gazing warmly over the painting. She’s known Durden through a family friend since Durden was 16. James is a decade older than Durden and their relationship feels like an older sister who props the door open for their sibling, letting them walk through on their own instead of holding their hand. James and Durden have collaborated on several projects, including a piece for James’s mural festival BLKOUT Walls.
The painting of Durden is part of a triptych called “Bereavement?” based on a 2019 piece James did for the Essence Festival in New Orleans depicting a woman removing a mask. This updated version also features James’s partner Lamar Landers.
Her original idea of unmasking the Black woman evolved into a new interpretation during her 2022 New York residency for the International Studio & Curatorial Program. James was working on the new version in a cramped New York studio when news of the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, mass shootings broke. Away from her loved ones, she felt isolated as she was left to grieve alone.
“So I’m in this box grieving. I’m pissed off and I’m thinking, I’m really expected to just go to the studio tomorrow like everything is normal?” she remembers. “So I got up in the morning, got every red paint marker I could find, and I just started drawing angry faces on the mask. I got some acrylic gel and started sculpting with it and that’s when I thought of ‘Bereavement?’ because what does it mean to bereave? A company will give you three days. Are you gonna get over your momma [dying] in three days?”
James then considered how the mask of perception looks different for every gender and non-gender. She was talking to her friend Durden a lot at the time and wondered what the young artist’s masks would be.
“After much contemplation, they said it would be a mirror because people address them how they see them, not how Bakpak sees themself,” James explains. In the piece, Durden is peeling a mirror from their face, which James sculpted with reflective material.
A separate series of four paintings on a rotating mechanism shows variations of James sitting on a stool in each panel. With locs piled atop her head in a messy bun, she looks at her phone with the word “OBSERVER” written on her hoodie. As the piece turns, her form is removed with just her hair appearing in the frame. In another panel, she’s been erased even further and only her “D” earring and sneakers remain.
This installation is called “Implicit Bias Training?”
“When we observe we’re observing via our experiences, our personal mirrors,” James says. “And when we’re observed, especially by you-know-who’s” — she means white people — “some can only describe this,” James adds, pointing to her hair. “Which is why sometimes the wrong person will get arrested. Sometimes they don’t see us at all. It’s a choice not to see humanity in people. Those are the ‘I don’t see color’ people. That means you don’t see humanity.”
James was told by MOCAD that Girl Raised in Detroit marks the first solo exhibition by a Black woman in the museum’s largest space, the Woodward Gallery. Others like Judy Bowman, whose Gratiot Griot exhibit closed in March, have shown work at MOCAD, but only in the museum’s smaller rooms.
It’s hard to believe considering the number of profound Black women artists the city has birthed, from Gilda Snowden to Shirley Woodson. Even worse, this milestone in James’s barrier-breaking career wasn’t intentional — her vision for the show’s large-scale paintings and installations simply wouldn’t fit anywhere else in the museum.
Most, if not all of the pieces for the show, incorporate texture like the skirt James molded out of fabric on “Serving Tee.” This is another revamped piece, this time in tribute to Detroit artist and friend Scheherazade Washington Parrish. It’s a nod to the hashtag #servingtee, which Parrish uses to post selfies wearing T-shirts made by Black creators during Black History Month.
In James’s piece, a woman lounging with a cup of tea wears a skirt decorated with cutouts of “fuck-shit that people have said” to her, as she puts it.
These include James’s sister saying, “You don’t have any kids. There’s no excuse for you to have that belly,” and an ex saying, “I just called to tell you that you was vain.”
“My high school sweetheart called me while I was in New York to tell me that I was vain because he thought I painted some ugly shit that I didn’t even paint… he thought that I painted myself,” she says, palpable irritation growing in her voice. “I was insulted twice. First of all, you thought I painted that ugly shit, and then that it was me?”
Her mother gently reminds her we’re in a church and she simmers down for a second.
There’s also a quote from the director of the ISCP residency on the skirt who remarked that “Serving Tee” could be a self-portrait even though James has locs and a caramel complexion — the opposite of the painting’s subject who is darker skinned with thick, wavy hair.
“The director of this prestigious program, this white woman, gon look at this painting and look dead at me, look back at the painting and say, ‘You know, if you add freckles to this, this would be a self-portrait,’” James says with a side-eye.
The story isn’t surprising for anyone who’s ever been mistaken for the other Black person at their job who looks nothing like them. Add it to the “mmmm hmmm” chapter of the existing-while-Black collection.
There’s also her personal favorite, “Sometimes I think about putting a baby in you to keep you still,” an insult to any woman but especially one as talented and hardworking as James.
But she’s used to the nonsense and doesn’t let it phase her. A short film about James by Detroit filmmaker Juanita Anderson, “Sydney G. James: How We See Us,” captures this in action as James and Durden are painting a mural of Wajeed, a hip-hop producer who James has known since she was a teenager.
One of her neighbors, an elderly man, approaches James inundating her with questions and unsolicited advice about using a ladder to help her reach the top of the mural.
“He would not leave me the hell alone,” she tells me about the exchange. “He ain’t used to seeing no shit like that. He’s probably used to seeing a white boy painting a mural. Maybe an Asian chick. Maybe a Hispanic young man. But a Black woman? This is foreign.”
We share a laugh over the absurdity of existing as a strong woman in a world that equates womanhood with softness and submission over simply being human.
“‘What you doin’ out here girl?’” she mimics men who harass her while she’s painting in public and we both cackle. “And I’m in charge? ‘Let me talk to your boss!’ Let me take off my artist hat and put on my manager hat. OK, you are speaking to the manager now.”
Back at her house, James’s basement doubles as a studio. Stacks of crates full of spray paint cans sit next to an unfinished piece hanging on the wall. Concept sketches for Girl Raised in Detroit are pinned on the other side.
Upstairs on the couch, James tells me she always thought mural painting was a “white boy’s game.” When she first participated in Murals in the Market in 2015, she was the only Black muralist and says she felt tokenized throughout her four years in the festival.
“I was also the only Black woman up until the fourth year when Sabrina [Nelson] painted too,” she says. “And they would repeat the Black artists that they had. I would tell them about other Black artists and they wouldn’t bring them in.”
She adds, “Why wouldn’t you want to match the demographic of the city? Honestly, it’s none of my business at this point. I can’t tell you how to run your program but what I can do is develop my own program, which I did.”
James created BLKOUT Walls in 2021 and featured mostly artists of color who took over the area around Detroit’s North End neighborhood with street art.
Just a year before, when James painted her iconic “Girl With the D Earring” mural on the side of the Chroma Building on E. Grand Boulevard, she noticed a shift in the way Black artists were treated.
“We were getting hired more and you didn’t have to argue or fight for your money,” she says. “I also used to just get hired to do a job but now, all of a sudden, there had to be a whole PR thing attached to it, even if I was hired to paint something for a business internally.”
She says the shift was due, in part, to the horrific 2020 murder of George Floyd.
“I don’t know why it took the public murder of a person to get you to hire the person that you should have been hiring all along,” she says. “When I was hired to paint the Chroma Building and they called to ask me if I wanted to take the job, they said, ‘We were gonna go in a different direction but after George Floyd, we decided that was the wrong way to go and we needed to hire a Black artist.’”
The double-edged sword of being the only Black artist in the room and getting hired just so a company can pat itself on the back for its false parade of diversity is an exhausting tightrope to walk.
But James jumped on the opportunity to paint over Katie Craig’s “Illuminated Mural” of colorful dripping paint created in 2011 that used to be on the building’s facade.
“Of course, I took the job. That’s the biggest fucking wall in the city. Everybody wanted to paint that wall and get rid of that nonsense,” she says about Craig’s long-gone piece. “The people in the neighborhood called it ‘electric vomit.’”
James did wonder, however, if she would be able to complete “Girl with the D Earring” given the wall’s past controversy. Craig successfully sued The Platform, the development company that had purchased the building, in a bid to protect her piece in 2016. But after the polarizing mural was irreparably damaged during renovations in 2020, it was a wrap for the rainbow ooze.
James’s play on Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” now stands as a tribute to Yolanda Nichelle Curry. The jewelry maker who made the popular Old English “D” earrings passed away from cancer in 2022.
“You know how sometimes you just get somebody and they get you like, whenever you see them it’s just everything?” James says about her relationship with Curry. The two met in 2013 through the Red Bull House of Art. “She gave me those earrings for my 40th birthday and I wore them shits every single day. They instantly became my favorite earrings, and we’re just so connected now.”
James also painted a mural dedicated to Curry inside MOCAD for the solo show with a wall where people can write a message to her.
Before BLKOUT Walls, “Girl With the D Earring,” and Murals in the Market, James had a lifestyle brand called G.R.In.D (pronounced “grind”) or “Girl Raised in Detroit,” where she put her artwork on clothes. The name was given to her by her partner Landers who was selling clothing under the G.R.In.D moniker before they met.
She also lived in Los Angeles for seven years from 2004 to 2011 where she was a resident artist for the ABC Family show Lincoln Heights. One of the show’s main characters, Cassie Sutton, was an artist and all her work on the show was actually painted by James. The show ran four seasons before getting canceled.
James has been in the art game for a long time — since she was 3, to be exact.
“I drew a picture of Gargamel, I copied him from my coloring book and I took it into the kitchen,” she remembers. “My mom was cooking and she didn’t believe me. She thought I traced it so she sat me down and made me do it again in front of her. Then it was like ‘OK, she can draw.’”
James’s kindergarten art teacher also noticed her talent and encouraged her parents to enroll her in art classes when she got “of age.” That age was 7, when she started taking classes at the College for Creative Studies. By the time she was 9, her mom was sneaking her into the adult classes at CCS.
“For kid’s classes, they’re crafty and they don’t really teach you a skill,” she says. “They weren’t doing shit for me so my mom started taking me to the more advanced classes [for] drawing, painting, whatever they had to offer.”
She deepened her skills at Cass Technical High School and would return to CCS to get her BFA in 2001.
Now James is a phenomenal painter, unapologetic in her bold depictions of Black beauty as she captures each highlight in her subject’s faces. But her legacy isn’t one of talent alone. She champions her fellow Black Detroit artists, giving them opportunities and advice that wasn’t always afforded to her.
Any time you see James working, she always has a crew of Detroiters with her, whether it’s Durden helping her paint a mural or Landers snapping photos of her process.
When it came time to film Anderson’s short, which is now streaming on PBS as part of American Masters, James invited artists Sabrina Nelson, Ijania Cortez, Scheherazade Washington Parrish, Halima Cassells, and others to join her on camera. Music composers Sterling Toles and Rafael Leafar scored the film.
James once told me, “If I eat, everybody eats.”
“My most important masterpiece is not my actual physical pieces,” she says as we get ready to part ways. “It’s gon be Bakpak. It’s gon be Ijania. It’s gon be Sheefy. It’s gon be Phil Simpson, Darius Baber, Cydney Camp. I never wanted to be by myself in this. I might want to be the best but I never wanted to be the only one because that shit is absurd to me. My former teacher and mentor Marian Stephens taught me, ‘You keep it for yourself, you cheatin’ everybody.’ So you got to share.’”
I catch a glimpse of the Wajeed mural as I turn the corner leaving James’s block. It’s valiant. Bright. Black.
She’s right. Her legacy will always live in the spotlight she shines on others.
Sydney G. James: Girl Raised in Detroit will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit from April 14-Sept. 3; 4454 Woodward Ave., Detroit; mocadetroit.org.
ABOUT SYDNEY G. JAMES
Sydney G. James is a fine artist/muralist raised in, and by, Detroit. She employs her fierce brushstrokes on canvas, fabric, brick and stone to provoke conversations, long silenced, on the ignored and invisible. Black women are first. Never last and never forgotten. Her figurative works boldly rewrite the narrative in hues evoking the complexities of Black reality, joy and pain, and phoenix-like resilience. Her murals have lit up walls in Detroit, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pow Wow Hawaii, Pow Wow Long Beach, Pow Wow Worcester, and across six continents. Sydney is a co-founder of the biannual BLKOUT Walls street mural festival, which debuted in Detroit in 2021. A 2017 recipient of the prestigious Detroit Kresge Artist Fellowship, she has been awarded residencies at Red Bull House of Art (2016), the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (2020), and a 2022 International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) residency in Brooklyn, NY. James’ artwork has been featured by marketing brands Vans shoes, PepsiCo, Ford Motor Company, Detroit Pistons and Detroit Lions.
