Abstract
Al Bright has been driven since childhood by his art, "a force inside him." He describes a childhood incident with racism, which taught him the feeling of "nothingness." The incident did not leave him hating white people, but did lead him to read philosophy, which has influenced his art. Bright won Junior Achievement award in high school, met CEO Ed Mosler who encouraged him to go to college and helped him attend the University of Youngstown. Bright came from a very musically creative family, and incorporates music with performance art. In graduate school he created a "walk-in" environment, designed to stimulate all the senses, two young women had a psychotic incident while in the room. Bright has moved on from this type of work. Bright describes his experiments with surrealistic paintings that incorporated Michelangelo's David. Bright began teaching right out of graduate school, he thinks teaching and doing art are linked, teaching allowed him to paint with a stronger sense of content, he would teach all day and paint all night. Bright sees all of his work as sequential, his greatest work is his life. He is very proud of his improvisational art, created in conjunction with live music, in front of an audience. He has worked with all types of musicians, from jazz to classical. As first black art professor at Youngstown he was asked to head Black Studies program, he feels that only African-American artists are asked if their race influences their art. Bright does not think about himself as black, but as a humanist and a human being. Blacks are not a monolithic culture. Bight relates his process, and how creating art in front of an audience is a tribal process, similar to primitive societies where artists and musicians are not separated from other members of society.
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Interviewee
Bright, Al (interviewee)
Interviewer
Dean, Sharon (interviewer)
Project
Cleveland Artists Foundation
Date
10-28-2008
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
91 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Al Bright Interview, 28 October 2008" (2008). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 901023.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/220
Transcript
Sharon Dean [00:00:01] My name is Sharon Dean. I’m the director of the Cleveland Artists Foundation, and I’m here today with Al Bright, who’s a professor and chair of the art department at Youngstown.
Al Bright [00:00:12] No, I’m not.
Sharon Dean [00:00:13] No, you’re not. You’re professor at Youngstown State University in the department of art.
Al Bright [00:00:18] I’m professor emeritus now. I’m retired.
Sharon Dean [00:00:21] Oh, well, congratulations.
Al Bright [00:00:23] Yes.
Sharon Dean [00:00:24] Professor emeritus.
Al Bright [00:00:26] Yes.
Sharon Dean [00:00:26] At Youngstown.
Al Bright [00:00:28] Youngstown State University.
Sharon Dean [00:00:31] And for the purposes of the record, can you give your birthday?
Al Bright [00:00:35] January … 1940.
Sharon Dean [00:00:38] Okay. Well, welcome and thank you for coming down to do this oral history with us. I appreciate it. You know, there’s an old- I do a lot of fieldwork with Native Americans, and when I talk to Native Americans and they tell me a story, they never start in the same place. They always start in the middle, the end, wherever. And I always would get confused. And the answer is always, well, Sharon, don’t you know that we never start in the same place twice? So I’m going to ask you something sort of at the end, more contemporary, and then we’ll sort of swing back and forth.
Al Bright [00:01:12] That’s fine.
Sharon Dean [00:01:14] I wanted to ask you, just for talking before the tape started rolling, about your participation in Yet We Still Rise, which was the seminal exhibit of African American artists in Cleveland from 1940 to 1970.
Al Bright [00:01:31] Yes.
Sharon Dean [00:01:32] And I wondered if you could talk about your participation in that exhibit. And first, let’s start with the essay you wrote for it.
Al Bright [00:01:41] Well, I was asked to do an essay or write an essay outlining the Cleveland Karamu artists for that, and I had been somewhat immersed in the historical development of the Cleveland Karamu artists heretofore. And I accepted the offer, and it took me about three months or so to write the essay. I was particularly interested in Charles Sully Jr. who I had developed a friendship and was doing some pretty in-depth study on his life and career. And the essay came together as a result of that.
Sharon Dean [00:02:40] And with the work that you did on Karamu, was there any part of that research that inspired you with your art or that you could see had a reflection in your artwork?
Al Bright [00:02:55] Not really, because my art comes from a different stimulus. So I’m immersed in my art and the center of where it comes from. So it’s not really influenced by anything necessarily outside of that. But I was academically very interested in the research I was doing because I learned a whole lot about Cleveland and a great deal about the artists and the WPA and so forth, and I was deeply immersed in all of that history. And it was all new. So I was very excited. As a matter of fact, it actually interrupted my creative process because writing and painting are completely two different directional endeavors. And you’re working on the left side or the right side of your brain when you, when you’re dealing with that. And it takes so much time. So I was really taken away from the studio during the period of actually writing and researching. But I learned a whole lot about Cleveland.
Sharon Dean [00:04:10] I wonder if you could talk about the stimulus for your work.
Al Bright [00:04:14] Well, I believe that all of us as human beings are driven by three basic things. They are heredity, environment, and past experiences. That’s what makes us all very unique. No two of us will ever be alike. And if you imitate me, I’ll always be better than you. So I’ve always believed that I was driven by that. I’ve been actually immersed in art since my early childhood. And I never thought of really making a career of it because I didn’t know originally if art was a blessing or a curse. Because I was held back in the third grade three years because of my art. Well, I kept drawing everything. The teachers were engaging me in questions and I wasn’t learning my phonics, but I tried to explain everything through my doodles and drawings. And consequently, I just kept being put back in the third grade. And I really didn’t move beyond that until I came to some realization by reading. I got involved in reading existentialism and so forth and really went into understanding that I was driven by a force or muse that was inside of me and that art was part of that.
Sharon Dean [00:06:03] Were you reading Jean Paul Sartre?
Al Bright [00:06:04] Yes, I was being of nothingness when I got to the fifth grade.
Sharon Dean [00:06:09] I bet your teachers didn’t understand that.
Al Bright [00:06:11] No, they didn’t. Nietzsche and all of that. Yeah, I mean, I spent my fifth grade actually going through the dictionary with a friend of mine that was a next door neighbor, Mel Watkins, who is a major writer today. We competed in sports. I was always better than him in terms of drawing, and he was outstanding in sports. I was fairly good in sports, but he was outstanding, particularly in basketball. But we were very competitive. But during the summer we formed a club called the Abecedarians. And we studied the dictionary and challenged each other on words. We went from A to M the first year and went beyond that. We had to know whether it was a verb or an adjective or a noun and all of the variations of the meanings of the words.
Sharon Dean [00:07:13] Very impressive. You could have been in the spelling bee today.
Al Bright [00:07:16] No, not really. But it did open my whole mind To a whole body of thought. But I never stopped drawing. And consequently, when I got to the seventh grade, I was on a different intellectual plane. I didn’t have any inferiority complexes about having been in the second grade or third grade for three years. Had a positive attitude about myself. And I walked into my art class in the seventh grade. And my teacher, John Naberezny, was one of the outstanding artists in the city. And this was the period of Abstract Expressionism. And he schooled us in abstract Expressionism and art history. And I found it extremely significant in terms of my life. And I went on to excel in that area.
Sharon Dean [00:08:21] I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the influence of Sartre in your artwork. Very interesting connection.
Al Bright [00:08:28] Well, it’s that one aspect of Sartre and Nietzsche and Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, all those people, they said that in every work of genius, you can see your own rejected thought thoughts. That’s something that really stuck with me purely. And when I processed that in my mind, I stopped imitating anything. You know, I just stopped imitating because it wasn’t satisfactory. I got no satisfaction from imitating. I wanted to delve further into my own possibilities and to maximize my own potential. And that’s what I did. And I did it throughout junior high school and high school. I joined all kinds of organizations just to learn more about people around me. I had some very dramatic experiences as a child, Particularly when I was 11 years old. I was on a little League baseball team in Youngstown, Donnell Ford’s. And I was the only African American on the team. But I was a star catcher for the team. And we won the city championship in 51. And I hit the home run, which led us to the championship. And we had a picnic schedule where we were going to get our trophies. And Donnell Ford rode us through downtown Youngstown in a heroes parade and on their new trucks and took us to the swimming pool, which was a public swimming pool in the south side of Youngstown. But when I walked in with my team, I was the hero of the team. And I was praised all through downtown, sitting on the trucks. And I walked into the pool area with my team, and the pool manager grabbed me by my uniform. And slammed me against a barbed wire fence. And told me that n—–s couldn’t come into this pool. And that if I came into the pool, his orders were to drain the pool. And so he physically locked me outside of the pool. And the team went in with the team coaches and some of the parents that had come. And they kept me outside of this pool from maybe 10 o’clock in the morning until lunch. And they came to feed me lunch, and I asked them to take me home. Well, Mrs. Mulligan, who was the team mother at that point, went to the pool manager, who was a teenager, early 20s, college student that was managing the pool for a summer job. And she read him the riot act and talked to him like a mother and told him that she wouldn’t tolerate me being outside of this pool for the duration and that no matter what his rules were, that he had to let me come in. So he reminded her that his rules were that if I came into the pool and put my hands in the water, they had to drain the pool. So he rang a siren, cleared everyone from the pool and unlocked the gate, aggressively pushed me into the pool area, put a rubber dinky in the pool with a rope on it, told me to get into the dinky, and my teammate, Joey d’Alessio, pulled me around the pool. And I was taken around the pool twice. And that day I learned something very, very powerful. Powerful. When I was being pulled around the pool, I stared everybody in their face, which I had systematically in my upbringing, because my family was very religious. And there was something that they had taught all of us as children, that if we were angry with an adult or particularly with your parent, you didn’t stare them down and show your anger. You know, you had to look at level below their face and humble yourself. You just couldn’t be mannish. And that you would really get in trouble for, you know, showing your aggression as a child toward an adult. But that day, I looked everyone in the eye and looked the adults in the eyes. I looked at my teammates, and everybody just lowered their head. They couldn’t make eye contact with me because everyone knew that the situation I was in was wrong. But no one had the courage to change it. And they couldn’t change it because it was the rule. It was de facto segregation in the city in the ’50s. We couldn’t sit on, be seated on the first floors of any of the theaters. The Warner Theater, Paramount State Theater, they would only sell African American seats for the balcony and sometimes in the loge, but none on the first floors. We couldn’t eat in any of the downtown restaurants except to take out. So I understood that. But I couldn’t understand being a hero one moment and being a pariah the next moment, and to look at people’s faces and to see that they had no courage or no really ability to really stand up against this conflict. So I Left that situation feeling not hatred or dislike toward anyone or particularly toward whites. I left just understanding being of nothingness and understanding that these situations were things that were to be changed to bring mankind to a higher state of being and humanity. And after I went around the pool twice, the manager aggressively pulled me out of the pool, pushed me to the outside of the gate, locked the gate, blew the siren, and everybody jumped into the pool and swam until about 5 o’clock. And I had to accept that when I went home to my parents, I couldn’t even. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t even tell them the experience because there was nothing that they could do either. But it led me to a very, very strong understanding of the behavior of human beings and a greater understanding of myself. And I grew from that experience. I didn’t come out of it hating anyone. I came out with a thirst for knowledge, to try to understand how humanity has been moved by having these kinds of experiences and then people finally having the courage to overcome. So it led me to reading and studying a lot more at that point.
Sharon Dean [00:16:30] So do you think that that experiences, and obviously others like it, have affected your work, your artwork?
Al Bright [00:16:37] You know, it hasn’t manifested itself in my work because one would think that I would have taken those kinds of experiences and there were others and transformed that or transplanted that in terms of what I. The imagery and the content, my work. But it never did. As a result, even today, I’m an abstract expressionist painter. I’m not a realist painter, although I’m very, very adept at realism. But I am not using my work from a political or social point of reference.
Sharon Dean [00:17:25] You know, I can absolutely understand and what you went through. I grew up in very rough neighborhoods in Philadelphia. And as a Jew, I’ve been spit on, kicked, beat up, the same sort of thing. So I understand this place that you come from which makes you stand up. And there are two ways to react. You can lie down or you can stand up.
Al Bright [00:17:49] Absolutely.
Sharon Dean [00:17:51] And in many ways, I feel that my own personal experience influenced what I became, influenced my experience. So I guess what I’m getting at is it may not have manifested in your work, but certainly the strength to continue and to have the confidence to continue doing what you’re doing certainly must have been there. And did that have an effect on saying, well, I’m going to be an artist, and that’s all there is to it?
Al Bright [00:18:19] You know, I never thought of myself as moving to be an artist. I am an artist because I am an artist, you know, I mean, that’s part of that heredity thing, I’m sure. You know, as I said, I didn’t know whether it was a blessing or a curse, but there is something inside of me that drives me to do what I do through my art. And I never made the decision that yes, I’m going to be an artist because when I had an opportunity to go to college as a first generation college student, I thought I should go to college and come out with an ology on my name. So I studied philosophy and psychology the first two years I was in college.
Sharon Dean [00:19:09] Where did you go to college?
Al Bright [00:19:10] At Youngstown, Youngstown University at that point. And actually I was going to be a barber because no one in my high school encouraged me to go to college, although I was 17th in my class. I was on the road club, I was National Honor Society, president of Junior Achievement in the community. I had all of those accolades, but no one had talked to me about going to college. And it was only through Junior Achievement that I really thought that I could go to college because I graduated in 1959 and I was selected to go to the Junior Achievement National Conference, NAJAC, which was at Indiana University. And I was one of the ten delegates from Youngstown. And I went to the conference and I won the talent show, the national talent show, singing Stardust like Nat King Cole. You know, I had my process. I was, you know, you can see it. And I also, a long time ago.
Sharon Dean [00:20:44] We came from the same neck of the woods.
Al Bright [00:20:46] Yeah. But I also won the speakers’ contest, the Reader’s Digest Speakers’ Contest, giving an impromptu speech on free enterprise. And at the national banquet, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies who were associated with Junior Achievement on a national scale came to the awards banquet. And there were 100 of us that had won national awards. And, and the CEOs came to make some of the presentations. And I happened to be seated at the table with S. Bayard Colgate of the Colgate Palmolive Company and Ed Mosler Jr. Who was the CEO and president of the Mosler Safe Company. And his father had built the vaults at Fort Knox. And he owned 30 some percent of the Knickerbockers and part of the Yankees. He was great, but he was the national vice president of JA at the national level. And so we had to stand up and introduce ourselves, tell the awards that we won table by table. And because we were all seniors, they wanted to know where we were going to college in the fall. So this was in August, and Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, all these schools were coming around. And I stood up and I said, I’m Al Bright from Youngstown, Ohio, and I’m on the waiting list to go to Irma Lee’s Barber School in Cleveland, Ohio. So there was this pot, this pregnant pause, and then all of a sudden, everybody broke out laughing. And we were eating green pea soup that was in the entree, and Ed Mosler was laughing so hard, the soup was just coming out of his nose. And everybody just lost it. They were just laughing as though I had told an Eddie Murphy joke. So I laughed myself and sat down. And Ed Mosler leaned over and he said, al, he says, you should have been a comedian. He says, you. You’ve won the national talent show. You’ve won the national speakers’ contest. He says, you have all of this potential, and you mean to tell me that. That you’re not going to college? And I says, no, I’m not going to college. They said, why? I said, because no one ever encouraged me to go to college, number one. Number two, I don’t know what I could be if I went to college. And number two, my parents couldn’t afford to send me to college because I think it cost them thousands of dollars. My mother was a nurse’s aide, and my father was a custodian. And so all of these factors, basically, I don’t know what I could be if I went to college. So Ed Mosler Jr. Said, It’s awfully late because it’s in August and schools have already started. In many cases, it’s too late maybe, to get admission. But if you’ll go back to Youngstown and find any school that will take you in that will help you go to college. So I went back to Youngstown. I was working in a sign shop, and I went back with this newfound enthusiasm to go to school. And finally, my aunt came down from Cleveland and she took me to the university, got my records and introduced me to the dean of admissions. And he looked at my records. He shook my hand and says, you’re in college, and you have a. I’ll even be able to give you a national government scholarship, you know, to help you with your tuition. So I was in college. I called Ed Mosler on the. You know, that same day and told him I had been admitted. He and Bayard Colgate both sent me $50 apiece to help me with my books and was enrolled. But when I enrolled, I enrolled in psychology and majored in psychology, minored in philosophy. And I was in that major combination of majors for Two years. And one day I was in the class and we were discussing. It was a class called- It was a class in Episcopal, the Theory of Knowledge. And we were studying Emerson, Thoreau. And there was a statement that the professor put on the board that day. It was the transcendental unity of a priori is the overshadowing unit of self awareness. And he would put a phrase like that on the board every day and ask us to discuss it. And that day I raised my hand to explain what I thought it meant. And he said, tell me what that means to you. I told him, you might have aspirations to, you know, to aspire to be anything, but you also have inclinations, things that you already are, you know, and you can aspire to be anything, but you’re inclined to be something that you already are. And until you can find the balance of what you want to do and what you really are, you can’t come to a relationship of self awareness and finding that is a real struggle that most people go through trying to find that balance of what you want to be and what you truly are. And he says, yes, precisely, precisely. And he gave me compliment. It was the first really major compliment I had ever received from a major professor. And I got up that day and I left the class and I went to the art department. And I walked into the art department. And who did I meet in the art department but John Naberezny, my seventh grade teacher, art teacher, who is now the chairman of the art department. And he told me, he says, al, I’ve been waiting for you for two years now. Take off that suit, and I want you to start working and painting. I was so happy. I sat down in what I thought was a chair in my beautiful Petrocelli silk suit.
Sharon Dean [00:28:19] You do dress very well.
Al Bright [00:28:22] I sat down and I sat down in what I thought was this chair, and I sat down on a pallet of oil paint and had all of this oil paint all over the back. And my suit just ruined it. He says, now just take off that damn suit and you come on in. You’re in the art department now. And I just found my. My whole life, you know, just totally blossom and open up. And I’ve been immersed in it fully and dedicated to it ever since.
Sharon Dean [00:28:54] Well, let’s follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the point that you made responding to the phrase on the blackboard that your professor put on, which is that you are who you are, and you can aspire to be anything you want to be, but you have inclinations based on who you are. So you are an artist. That’s just all there was to it. You were born an inherited artistic ability, but you grew up in the age of abstract Expressionism. So how did you use what was available to you to express yourself? Because obviously you grow up in a certain context, you grow up in a certain milieu, and you have to use the tools that are available to you to express yourself. When you were a child, you were doodling. And when you got older, how were you expressing yourself? Through what media?
Al Bright [00:29:52] Well, there was a lot of creative people in my family. My father, my mother were both very creative musically. My mother played the piano. She was the Sunday school pianist at the church. My father in his younger days played a guitar. And he gave the guitar up when he married my mother. And they converted to the church because they stopped going to the clubs and that sort of thing. My brother was a very serious, talented jazz pianist. And my sister is still, as we speak, a very talented gospel singer. My brother is deceased now, but he was a very, very talented pianist and had his own little doo wop group and later went on to develop a very serious jazz band himself. And so all of that was around me constantly. And so I was interested in music and particularly jazz and all of this, all of my life. And I saw a close relationship between performance art and visual art. And I tried to marry the two together because early on in my career I was painting constantly to music, both jazz, classical, any of that. And I was, as a result, pioneering performance art very early in the 50s. And when I had an opportunity to go on to grad school, I started moving more into installation. I was trying to put the individual inside of my work. I was working on a really large scale in undergraduate school. But when I went to Kent, I started building walk in environments, putting together fifteen 6x8 canvases and building a room of those canvases. And finally they culminated into a walk in environmental room for my thesis, where I had the ceiling and the walls and the floors all under the control of the work. The twenty-one 6x8 canvases filled the walls. I had a homasote ceiling which I painted into the canvases. And I had mirrors on the floor that refracted the ceiling down into the floor. And you entered the room through one of the canvases. And when you shut the door of that canvas set you into the room, you were actually inside of the room. And I lit the room from the outside and controlled it with a 21 Davis dimmer board where I can control the lights. You had to take off your shoes to get a tactile sensation with the floor. There was incense in the room to stimulate the smell or smell. And I piped music into the room. And I put the observers then inside of my work. And stimulated all of the senses. And that’s what I wrote my dissertation on at the school. The possibilities of sequentialism in art and walk in environments. So that was a carryover, I guess, from my philosophy. Because I wanted people inside of a living thing. And my work became existential in that regard.
Sharon Dean [00:34:04] Did people outside perceive the same silhouettes of the people inside the room?
Al Bright [00:34:09] No. No. You had to literally go in into it. And because of the size, it was 18. 18ft square. You actually, you know, I could put a. 15, 20, 30 people in the room. And the psychology department came over and did some studies on the room. And they told me that the room was dangerous because prepsychotics might have an episode in the room. And it happened on two occasions.
Sharon Dean [00:34:43] What happened?
Al Bright [00:34:45] It was the last week of the exhibit. And two ladies, they were freshmen girls at the university, came in, and they went into the room. And I was in the process of dismantling and taking my work out of the studio spaces at that time. And I went to the cafeteria and left the girls in the room. And I set a mood with the lights. And I think I was playing some Thelonious Monk music. And I had a.
Sharon Dean [00:35:22] A favorite of mine.
Al Bright [00:35:23] Yeah, mine too. And I had a mood light set because I could light the room so intensely that it was brighter than daylight. But I could take down the temperature of the lights to the point where it was so dark you couldn’t even feel your hand before your face. And I painted the room with oil paints. And I came to Cleveland to a paint company here called the Switzer Brother Company. Who had developed special paint for the army for the Second World War. It was called invisible paint. And they were the company here that developed dayglo paint and all of that. But this paint was invisible paint. It was white. Yes. You needed a black light. It came in eight colors, but under incandescent light, it was all white. And the army would paint their trucks, you know, symbols on their trucks and things. And under black light from planes, they could then see the trucks at night and so forth. There were images on the. On the truck at night. So I integrated that invisible paint into my oils. And I was painting cumulus cloud shapes that would swing through the whole room into the ceiling. And I painted certain portions of it with the oil paints. And integrated this invisible paint. And when I switched the image incandescent lights off and brought up black light, the oil paints would turn dark, or even some of them just go black. And all of these other colors would just scream into the room. And then as I faded that out, those invisible colors would fade away and the regular oils would come up. So the room was literally breathing, and it was incredible. Plus, the. The images from the ceiling were transferred down into these mirrors I had on the floor. And so you just were literally floating inside of this space. Well, I went to the cafeteria, I came back, and there were policemen and ambulance outside of the heating plant, and people were crowding at the staircase. I thought maybe there was a fire in my room, had caught a fire or something. And I went up and they were carrying these two girls out of my walk in environment. And they were hysterical. I mean, they were totally hysterical. And the one girl thought or had an. An illusion that her brother, who was fighting in Laos and had, I guess, had died in the war, she saw him step through one of my paintings, or she had the illusion that he did, and she saw him step through the painting. And she went berserk and started running to get out of the room. And because you were disoriented once you got into the room, because you came into it through a painting, and now the room had transformed because of the colors moving and so forth. She couldn’t find her way out. She was crashing over the mirrors, broke, broke the mirrors, cut her leg. And was just hysterical trying to get out of this room because of the, you know, the illusion.
Sharon Dean [00:39:20] So in terms of psychology, that kind of tapping into sensations has its implications for the senses. So you have to be careful how you do that. You don’t do that today?
Al Bright [00:39:31] No, I followed through. After I was graduated, I put the room or reconstructed the room for the Trumbull County Fair. The mental health institute asked me to put the room back up again. And I put the room at the county fair, and I constructed it again there. But it wasn’t quite the same because I didn’t have all of the technical assistance to do it there. But now I still paint large. And I hope that people still have the feeling of going into my work in that same sense, But I moved on.
Sharon Dean [00:40:12] You grew up, obviously, during the age of abstract expressionism. And I’m wondering how the influence of the civil rights movement in the 60s played into perhaps evolving your work in a different direction or maybe solidifying it where it is.
Al Bright [00:40:29] That’s a good question. It did have an impact on me as it did on our whole society at the time. And during the period I was still working in an abstract direction, actually moving more toward heavy impasto. So my works were really getting very tactile at that point. Well, a realtor in Youngstown came to me and asked if I would take a commission to do a painting for his office. And he wanted me to do an image of Martin Luther King. Because Martin was shot in ‘68. That was something he wanted for his office. And so I at first didn’t want to do it because, you know, I was engaged in non objective work at the time. But I had excellent skills in representational. So I did a series of work studies and I came up with a painting for him which I called Bromosynthesis, in which I actually took parts of great masters’ works. And I- What do you call it? I incorporated part of their work and put them into somewhat of a montage with other great masters works and made a psychological statement. And what I did in the painting that I did for him, I took Caravaggio’s David holding the head of Goliath. And I took the head of Martin Luther King or figure that was like Martin Luther King or symbolizing Martin Luther King. And I took the head of Goliath out and I had his head in the hand and he was holding this. David was holding that head in front of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers Guild. So they were like judges and looking at the situation and it started a whole series. I did maybe 28 works after that, fell in love with that whole concept. And I juxtapose all kinds of symbols, appropriated them and put them together in that manner. And I had a big show of those works at Stanford University in ’69 or ’70. And I called it Bromosynthesis. And I. I just experimented with. Basically I kept using David, that image of Caravaggio’s David, but I kept integrating different heads and putting them in different arrangements. I actually did one with Grant Wood’s Gothic painting, American Gothic. I had David holding the head of the wife in that painting in front of her husband who was standing in front of the house, the farmhouse, with his pitchfork. And, you know, and he was so proud as a farmer and so into his image as a farmer that he didn’t even recognize that his wife was literally decapitated and taken away. But he still was in this post staring away. And the head was here and David was holding it in front of him. I did another one in Which I had the head of, of a figure of Rembrandt in front of the syndics of the Drapers Guild. And sitting in the front was Andrew Wyeth’s Mrs. Olson sitting in a rocking chair. You know, the one where she was basically asleep with the cat on her lap. You couldn’t tell whether she was dead or alive really in the painting. And the head was in front of her, she was nodding off. And then the descendants of the Drapers Guilds were, you know, overlooking all of this. I had, you know, exhausted baroque images and Renaissance images throughout that whole series. But it was pretty interesting.
Sharon Dean [00:46:04] So when we move into the 70s now after the civil rights movement and you were working, obviously you’re working beyond where yet we still rise. Took, took the exhibit from 1940 to 1970. How did you feel? How did you feel your work started to change after that series was done?
Al Bright [00:46:23] Well, I abruptly, abruptly shifted after I exhausted this. 28 large works in that series. And then I just went back. I just put that away and went strongly back into my work again. I guess it’s part of my personality. It’s maybe why I have never really engaged in new technology like the computer. Because once I get involved in something, it takes me away. And the same thing happened when I was asked to do these essays and I started to write and research. It just kind of took me away from my body of work. And then that became my mistress. And so I had to put all of that away and get back to what really, really was the center of my heart.
Sharon Dean [00:47:19] What do you think has been the biggest accomplishment for you as an artist?
Al Bright [00:47:24] That I’ve been able to survive and that against all odds, I’ve been able to both teach and create. I remember in. In grad school, my professors O’Sickey and Harold Kidner, Elmer Novotny were primarily artists that came out of the Cleveland School. So Kent was pretty representational in their direction and followed the Cleveland School of Art much in their program. And when I came into the program, I came in as a, you know, an abstract expressionist. And I. That’s what led me to ultimately that room and so forth. But I started to teach the year I was graduated Naberezny was still there for me. Came down, saw my walk in environment and hired me on the spot. Took me to the university right after I was graduated and took me to the president and said he wanted to hire me. And consequently I became the first African American full-service hire in the university since 1908. And the teachers told me [inaudible], I don’t know if you should go into teaching because it’s going to be very difficult for you to be a teacher and teach and also creating at a high level. I told them that I thought I could do both. And I thought that teaching and creating are inextricably tied together, you know, because you’re giving and you’re learning and you’re working with young, inventive mind, so you’re constantly in a creative process, you know. I learned how I really began to draw much stronger by teaching drawing. I painted stronger with a greater sense of content and understanding of the medium, media and so forth as a result of teaching and art history and so forth. And so I’ve been mastering both. And so, to a large extent, I considered myself to be an artist educator. And it was a rich experience. I would teach all day and I’d come home and paint all night. And then I’d go to class with so much energy from painting all night. And I go to a class where I’m teaching painting. And I could bring so much more from staying engaged with all of that constantly. And it also gave me a sense of humility in caring for my students and trying to bring out the best in them and, you know, just been engaged in that. And I taught for 43 years and I’ve had thousands of students, many of whom I helped to help them find themselves and maximize their potential. I’ve had some great, great people and I enjoyed it so much.
Sharon Dean [00:51:07] Do you have a favorite piece of artwork either for meaning or for what you were able to accomplish or get out of it?
Al Bright [00:51:16] Just one singular or a series? Well, you’d have to see my work because my work is constantly in a series. You know, I look at something I did 30 years ago and something that I’m doing now, and I see a continuity. And when I have the opportunity to have solo exhibitions or retrospectives, which I’ve had, and I had a 20-year retrospective at the Butler back in ’80, and when I looked at what I was doing 20 years prior and what I was creating at that particular time in a grouping, it was like a sequential piece of work, fragments that were part of a whole. And you could see the continuity and all of that. And so I still think that my life is my greatest work and that the painting is still progressing and that someday it’ll all come together. It may be my final work, but I think everything I’ve done, you know, is a part of everything that I’m yet to create.
Sharon Dean [00:52:45] What are you working on?
Al Bright [00:52:46] Now, well, I have almost come full, full circle. I went back in 1990, 1990s, ’99, ’98, ’99. And I was invited to put up an installation at the Canton Institute of Art. And I. I did another sequential composition. Another room put up ten six by nine foot canvases. They were again sequential, but it followed a color scheme that went through the whole room. And at that point, instead of having music in the environment, I was in the process now of actually creating my work before live audiences to live musicians, and actually going on the stage and actually creating my work before the audience. The audience then became a part of the work. And the ebb and flow of their feelings, you know, helped to drive the energy in the painting. Sometimes I was actually driving the energy of the. Of the band. And sometimes I was part of the band because I was a percussionist in my work and so forth. And I had carried that to this point where this room was going to be a final point of bringing this thing to the highest point. Because I had contracted Ahmad Jamal to come to the Canton Museum. And he was going to perform for me. And I was going to complete a 6 by 10 foot painting which would have been the door for this room, to hermetically seal it. And circumstances prevented it. The museum sent out an announcement and a flyer for the engagement and failed to put in a phone number for reservations. It was going to be at the Canton Institute, but there was the painting performance was going to be in the Symphony hall in Canton. And the Symphony hall was inside of Canton McKinley High School. It was called the Armstead Theater. But if you called Canton for directions for the Olmsted Theatre, there was no Olmsted Theater because it was inside Canton Mc McKinley. It just ended up to be a disaster. And they didn’t advertise it properly. They didn’t even advertise it outside of Canton, to Cleveland, where there was a huge jazz community there. But anyway, the trustees panicked and canceled out the concert. So I never was able to complete that tenth piece to Ama Jamal. But earlier on, I did have the opportunity in 1980 to do a live painting performance with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I brought him to Youngstown, to the Youngstown Playhouse. And we performed for two and a half hours. And I produced one of the most incredible pieces I’ve ever done in that environment or under that situation. And he brought Wynton Marsalis with him. Wynton was 19 years old. James Williams was 20 years old, the bassist.
Sharon Dean [00:57:11] The trumpet must have been incredible.
Al Bright [00:57:13] Oh, I have a video of that performance. And Wynton was just- He was on his first gig out of New Orleans.
Sharon Dean [00:57:20] Have you ever done this kind of performance at Nighttown?
Al Bright [00:57:23] Not at Nighttown, but I performed it all. I performed all over the country with various groups, symphony orchestras, jazz orchestras, primal screaming.
Sharon Dean [00:57:37] I saw Count Basie at Nighttown last year, so it reminded me of your performance piece. I was going to ask a question about your early upbringing and your involvement in the church. And I’m wondering if you feel, particularly because of your studies of existentialism and philosophy, if you feel that the spirituality that you gain from being involved in the church gave you discipline or gave you freedom, or did it give you both?
Al Bright [00:58:09] Well, it surely gave me discipline because we were in church quite a bit, because my. As I said, my mother was the Sunday school pianist, and she also sang in a group, had a gospel singing group called the Gospel Jubilee. My father was a deacon, so we were in prayer meeting and all that stuff. Wednesdays go to church and rehearsals and that. So I was in the church more than most children. And there’s a certain discipline that you have as a result of being with adults in the church and manners and that kind of thing that you had to observe. But that atmosphere of the church and the music and the whole spiritual thing, that’s a part of the church and the community that really did play a part in how I felt about myself, how I felt about others. And it did have-
Sharon Dean [00:59:26] So, in a way, it did give you the freedom to be who you felt you are.
Al Bright [00:59:30] Yeah, I began to find, you know, my whole spiritual center. And it did humanize my thinking about my art and the world in which I existed in.
Sharon Dean [00:59:44] Now that we’re sort of in a, almost at a crossroads, if you think of it politically, if you think of it culturally as well, where an African American has a really, really good shot at going to the White House. And a lot of things about American culture have changed that have made it possible. So I’m wondering about, you know, your feelings about participating in this show, which is a sequel to Yet We Still Rise in each Their Own Voice. And I don’t quite know how to word it or articulate it, but do you feel that the era of being an African American artist, do you feel as an African American artist, or do you feel that you’re an artist who just happens to be African American?
Al Bright [01:00:39] Yeah, you know, I really- I really feel that that’s a question that is only asked of African Americans. I mean, I- You know, I just don’t see Rauschenberg and Paul Jenkins or any of these other artists, Jasper Johns, any of these people who are really immersed in their work. I don’t see, see that the culture is interested in their race.
Sharon Dean [01:01:08] I only ask it because it is a group of African Americans that are doing the show. It’s sort of the white elephant in the room. And to not address it and to not allow you to express your voice over it, I think would be a mistake.
Al Bright [01:01:23] Well, I have opinions, but I mean, it’s just a phenomena that it’s an indication that race is still a deep rooted problem in the culture. When you pigeonhole someone on the basis of race. See, my thought pattern has shifted so far away from this because I’m thinking cyclically. I’m not. I’m not thinking and rationalizing anything from a linear progression. Because I think that’s a real trap when things are linear as opposed to cyclical. And I came to grips with this after talking with our Buckminster Fuller. And realizing that we shared something in common. He saw something in my art that was similar to things that changed his whole point of view. Without a long conversation on this. And I will get back to this. I met R. Buckminster Fuller in 1970. 1970. 1971.
Sharon Dean [01:02:51] Was that before or after he did the American Society of Medals here in Cleveland or just outside of Cleveland, or-
Al Bright [01:02:59] I’m not sure of the date in which he did that here, but this was in 1970, 71. And he @ that time was one of the geniuses in the world, along with Einstein. This is so much information here. I was at that time again, the only African American on full service at the university. The university had asked me to develop and direct our first Black studies program on the campus. So I was now director of Black Studies, assistant professor in the art department. But I was in a management and teaching situation. But I was invited to the lecture for Auerbach Minster Fuller by the new president of the university, who was Albert Pugsley. The university changed from a private university to a State University in 1970. And we were the last school to go into the state system. And the new president was brought aboard. Albert Pugsley. And he was a graduate from University of Minnesota. And he was the roommate with R. Buckminster Fuller at the university. So he started the Skeggs lecture series. And he brought R. Buckminster Fuller in to be the first Skeggs lecturer. And I was invited to that. That dinner. I went to the dinner. I was seated next to the president and Auerbach Minister was on the other side. We did not at that time have a PhD in physics at the university. But we had a lot of the scientists were invited to the meeting or to the dinner with him. And they were asking him all of these esoteric questions. Trying to impress him, I guess. And he just sat there with these big jugular glasses. His eyes looked like fish eyes under these huge glasses. And he just sat there and he just looked at them like he was looking at turtles. And so I had nothing to ask him at all. You know, I had read his materials. I knew about his geodesic dome and his three wheeled cars and his status as a great scientist. So I didn’t ask him any questions. And at the end of the dinner, he asked the president, who was I. And the president told him that I was Albright. And that I was in the Department of Art. And he asked what I did. And he said, well, he’s come from Kent State University. And he was working on these walk in environments, he called them. And he was putting people inside of his art and all of that. So R. Buckminster Fuller asked the president if I would stay for a minute before he went on to lecture. Because he wanted to talk to me personally. So they put me in a room off of the stage with our Buckminster Fuller before he talked. Now I’m sitting in the room, just like you and I, with this genius. And he told me in about 10 minutes of talking in the room, he says, professor, he says, you’re going to understand what I’m going to talk about tonight. Probably more than the scientists and scholars on your campus. Because they think I’m going to talk about science and my inventions and so forth. But I’m not talking about that tonight. My subject is going to be the origin of the university. And how the university was formed in the world. And he says, you’re going to understand me. Because I think you and I share a common. A common drive. He said that he was born legally blind in New England. In a Calvinist family that didn’t allow him to get glasses until he arrived at the point of puberty. It was just a custom. I mean, the same thing with me. I mean, my customs in my family, or in my ear, I should say, was that children couldn’t wear. I couldn’t wear long pants. I had to wear knickers until I became close to a teenager. I couldn’t get a part in my hair because I couldn’t do that until I got to a certain age. Because just if I went to church With a par in my hair, you know, people would look at me as though I was mannish or something, you know. And he said he and his sister. Auerbach Minister said he had his sister. And he would go out in nature while he was growing up, and. And they were constantly arguing about what they were seeing because he would pick up something in nature and he was seeing it all out of focus, and he would argue about these things. And when he got his first pair of glasses and nature came into focus, the first object he picked up was a beehive cone and a pine cone. And when he saw the tessellation, he. In those forms, he said he was so fascinated that everything had a pattern and all things were made up from tessellations, units repetitively growing and repeating themselves. That led him to the geodesic dome. And that fascination never left him, you know, for the rest of his life. And it’s the same, you know, same feeling that I had, you know, about. Just like you. It’s like falling in love. You. You know, you just become aware of it. And when you fall in love, it’s like you’ve known that person that you’re in love with forever, and you just become aware that you’ve known them forever. You don’t engineer it. You discover it by seeing something that’s obviously before you at all, you know, forever, but now you recognize it. And so he went out on the stage that night, blowing up this plastic balloon that was a. A globe of the earth. And he started talking for an hour and a half about the origin of the university and how he got started. And he said that the university was not designed by the scholars. It was a political move that was organized by the pirates. Said the frugalist period was waning because the pirates were bringing in raw materials from different parts of the world. And modernity was starting to emerge in Europe. And there became a period where they had idle youth, because the youth, in different periods after modernity started emerging, didn’t have to work in the same manner as their parents. So there was idle time among the youth. And the youth began to see that the land barons were taxing the people for the war against the pirates. But the pirates were controlling the kings and that they were the most powerful because without their raw material, the land barons, you know, couldn’t have emerged out of feudalism or the medieval period.
Sharon Dean [01:11:42] I always thought that universities emerged out of guilds.
Al Bright [01:11:46] Well, he said that the idle youth started seeing this relationship between the land, the barons, and the pirates, and the pirates were the ones who suggested that they had to get the youth out of their hair. So they suggested that to establish this university concept where you take the brightest of those youth and you get them away from cyclical thinking and put them and immerse them into linear thinking, you take the brightest of them and you get them immersed in studying the backbone of a tsetse fly, and you take another group and have them studying mathematics and whatever, and then you stratify them in different directions. You give them velvet and platforms and status and the whole bit. You give them languages for each one of the disciplines, so they can’t even begin to even converse. So a scientist might tell someone, go exterminate the illumination. And the other person doesn’t even know he’s telling them to turn out the light, because they have a language for each of the disciplines in this whole structure. And so you lose scope that everything in the universe is moving in a cyclical pattern. And they get involved in these pigeonholes. And now the only cyclical thing that, you know, our culture is involved in primarily is buying things we don’t need with money we don’t even have to impress people we don’t like. And that’s the only cyclical thing. But otherwise, you know, we’re just stratified into these categories. And if you label somebody, then they. They become that thing that you label. You know, you’re blonde, you’re brunette, and you’re tall, you’re. You’re short, you’re Black, you’re white, you’re rich, you’re poor, and you get stuck in these categories, and you begin to act out those titles and definitions, and people start reacting to you by the labels that you impose on you. So instead of thinking of myself as a Black artist, I think of myself as a humanist, a human being. And my art is about humanity. It’s not necessarily about race or social struggle and all of that stuff. And so it’s preposterous to me to sometimes accept the title of, you know, Black artist or Black art and all of this. And I think this show is going to be a wonderful expression of the diversity, the diversity that exists among this community, which is a community of black people. But it’s going to show that black people are not a monolith, but that we, like most of the culture, are involved in a broad diversity and should not and cannot be classified and treated in that way.
Sharon Dean [01:15:29] That’s very fascinating. That in each their own voice will be expression of differences.
Al Bright [01:15:36] Absolutely.
Sharon Dean [01:15:38] Within the community. So one other question I had for you, which I don’t think we got into, was what. What did you. I know that youre seventh grade teacher helped you, but what was your first show like, your first solo show? And how did that impact you in subsequent shows that you did? So when I was talking to Michelangelo Lovelace earlier, he talked about it as a pivotal moment for him that gave him the confidence to continue on.
Al Bright [01:16:13] Well, I think I started showing in undergraduate school. We had a. An art club called the Experis. And we would meet once or twice a month at different artists studios and sometimes at the college and critique each other’s work. And that’s where, you know, the. The rubber met the road. Or as they say, because you’d bring your work, your best work, which you thought was your most experimental, innovative stuff, and you’d put it up and 20 or 30 artists would just literally rip it apart or tear this stuff up, and you do the same thing, giving your ideas and entering their aesthetic world. And that was the first- First real- That was like an exhibition because it was critiquing and really getting various points of view verbally about what your work was saying to a body of people.
Sharon Dean [01:17:25] So at that time, as your work was developing, who was most influential on you? Besides your seventh grade teacher, were there other artists that you studied with who. Who also had an impact on you?
Al Bright [01:17:37] Well, I historically studied the major people who were in the forefront of the work in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s, and I saw the emergence of Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Motherwell, these people. But I never imitated them because I always carried this idea in my head that if you imitate, you would always be secondary. And no one could imitate me, so why should I imitate someone else? Oh, he did.
Sharon Dean [01:18:15] He did. He said the same exact thing.
Al Bright [01:18:17] Whoa. Well, he was one of my teachers at Kent, but I don’t know. I had this idea before I met Osiki, but he told me this story.
Sharon Dean [01:18:27] Where he said he was in second grade and he was doing an art project, and this girl next to him was copying something out of a magazine, and he told her she was cheating.
Al Bright [01:18:40] No interruption. But I admired a lot of the artists that were emerging, and the work was significant to me. But I saw a strong connection with the energy in the nineteen, late forties and fifties among the artists that was coming not so much from a new aesthetic that was developing, but I saw how much the music at the time was impacting on the energy in their work. Now there was in the musical arena, you Had Hard Bob jazz going on. You had Monk and Miles and Trane and all of these big, you know, chick. All these people were just coming up with the first real art form in the United, in the world, or at least in the United States. Jazz was the only creative art form that was invented here in the United States. Everything else was imported. A lot of the art that was going on was simply offshoots from Dada and European expression. But jazz was invented here, and jazz was having such an impact on the art, and improvisation was what artists were searching for. A lot of the artists wanted to have this spontaneity, this feeling of. Of improvisational activity in their work and so forth. And they were all moving in that direction. And I was deeply involved with jazz and actually started playing jazz at that point. I play jazz flute and I used to hang out with my brother’s group. I’ve had some nice encounters with Cannonball Adderley, Yusef Lateef, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, jam sessions with all of that. But I know how it feels to create from that bass. And that was what I wanted to really carry over into my art. So earlier on, I started doing performance pieces and actually going on the stage and creating my work before live audiences to jazz music or all sorts of experience. I work with poets. I even did some work with ministers, preaching sermons, gospel choir singing, ballet dancers, poets, symphony orchestras. I’ve done about 75 performance pieces like that since, you know, the ’60s.
Sharon Dean [01:21:41] Do you still do that?
Al Bright [01:21:42] I’m still doing that, yes. As a matter of fact, my strongest work, if you ask, is coming from those particular pieces because it’s so spontaneous.
Sharon Dean [01:21:52] Would you consider doing a piece at the gallery? We talked about it later.
Al Bright [01:21:56] Absolutely, Absolutely. Absolutely.
Sharon Dean [01:22:00] I think that obviously I grew up in the ’60s, so my generation is a little bit different. But I do feel that in many ways, I’m a product of that type of learning environment, which was a stimulation to all senses. And I think that one of the ways for people to understand the production of art is to really immerse them in that process. And I’m wondering what kind of energy you develop. How do you work that process with the audience to get them involved in what you’re doing?
Al Bright [01:22:37] Well, firstly, I start with a blank canvas alla prima. I don’t go to the canvas with any preconceived notion or drawing or sketches. And the music starts, and the composition begins with breaking the space of that blank canvas and just manipulating and working it from that point on. And the audience or the spectator becomes involved deeply with that process. Because as the painting is emerging and developing, the audience is seeing something that the artist is not seeing. See, I’m involved in a creative process. They are involved, at best, with an aesthetic process. And they may see something they like or envision or see, and they don’t want it to be destroyed. And as I’m destroying and recreating constantly through this process, because I- That’s what it is about, just destruction and remaking of it. You can feel the ebb and flow of their feelings. When I go through something, destroy a color or shape or something that they see, you feel it. And that’s the process that ultimately leads to that magic moment where everyone, the musicians, the audience and myself as the painter can know that all of that energy now is coming to a closure. And that to destroy anything else in the work would mean to start it all over again.
Sharon Dean [01:24:30] How do you know when to stop?
Al Bright [01:24:31] It’s a feeling, and the audience knows as well. You’ll have to see some of the videos because it’s a magical experience. It’s very tribal. It’s somewhat similar to what happens in all primitive societies, because you don’t. I mean, the artists in the primitive society is not divorced from the musicians. The musicians are not divorced from the dancers. And they all do this in a communal fashion where the whole society or the whole culture is centered around all of that activity coming together. The artist isn’t creating the mask for a gallery. The musician isn’t creating the music for a concert, something else. Everything is inextricably tied together. And when all of that energy comes together, then there’s this aesthetic experience that the spectator and everyone reaches a climatic moment where something happens to cause a conversion.
Sharon Dean [01:25:51] Now, do you meet with the orchestra musicians beforehand?
Al Bright [01:25:56] No, no, absolutely not. I don’t rehearse. They come, they play in most of the musical groups I’ve never heard or played with before. I had an experience in upstate New York at Binghamton, at one of the New York state schools. I was doing a solo or duet with Jimmy Owens, a jazz trumpeter from New York City. And we had talked on the phone for maybe a year, off and on about doing this, and finally were able to pull it off at this college. And he got off the plane, came to the stage, and we just hit it, you know. And we were in such intense activity, and the audience was so into this whole experience that I actually had my- I had a heart attack. First heart attack I had, this was 1984. I’m painting my heart out. And all of A sudden something hit me in the chest like an elephant standing on my chest. And my whole left side just went. Went completely numb. I couldn’t lift anything. I couldn’t breathe. And I thought I was going to die. So I was able to struggle off the stage and go and lie down behind the stage. And Jimmy then came to my canvas and he was playing to the canvas. Nobody knows the truth. Trouble. I see he was playing that. And I was behind the stage hyperventilating, couldn’t breathe. And I got enough strength that I got up and I went back out and I tried to play my flute and I couldn’t get a breath out of my flute because I was going to kind of do a contrapposto kind of flute with this trumpet and I couldn’t blow it. And then I was able to paint with my right hand and finish up the work. And the energy from the audience was so strong that for a short period of time after I had finished the work, we went through a half hour question and answer with the audience and had this incredible dialogue about the work. Now, they didn’t know I was. I had a heart attack. And I was able to go through the question and answer serious, clean up the stage, go back to the hotel and come back to town. And I survived it. And I had the video of that. It was one of the most powerful paintings I’ve done, but it was really a frightening experience. It’s life-threatening because you, you’re in the realm of the unseen when you’re on that plane. This is something that is so incredible about knowing that you can do anything to this canvas and it would be right. I could throw paint at it. I turn the painting constantly while I’m working so that I’m disorienting myself to it. I paint it upside down, right side up, every side. I’m dancing in the work. It’s a total engagement.
Sharon Dean [01:29:31] Well, it will be fascinating to do. I look forward to the show and I look forward to having you come to our gallery and advertising it properly, of course, and getting as many people as we can to see you do this, because it sounds like it would be incredible.
Al Bright [01:29:47] Well, I. I would be honored to do it, but you had better do it quickly before I get too old to move in that same fashion. That was one of the gigs I did at Kent State.
Sharon Dean [01:30:07] Just for the record, it has been an honor to interview you and talk with you today. And I look forward to working with you over the next few months, to realizing the show and to having you come to the gallery.
Al Bright [01:30:21] Well, I think it’s going to be an incredible exhibit, and I’m very happy and honored to be a part of the show. And I’m excited to see it all come together and happy to know that Bill Busta is putting his genius into this.
Sharon Dean [01:30:40] He is a genius.
Al Bright [01:30:41] Yes, he is.
Sharon Dean [01:30:42] He has. He knows just the right things to put together and how to hang things.
Al Bright [01:30:47] Well, he’s. He is a insightful individual, and he’s put the flag in the mountain in Cleveland.
Sharon Dean [01:30:57] Yes, he has. Thank you so much, Al.
Al Bright [01:30:59] Thank you.
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