Northwest Black Visual Artist Battling Cancer
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This GoFundMe is a radical call for an investment in an exceptional African American visual master artist, Isaka Shamsud-Din, because we live in radical times in which the disparity of economic inequality denies too many who have given so much, the ability to create and survive simultaneously. This is especially true for African American visual artists whose communities do not have expendable funds to purchase art, so that economic stability while admittedly arduous for visual artists of any ethnicity, becomes nearly impossible during ones’ wisdom years. And even though a few African American visual artists have deservedly risen to national and even global attention, the art market remains exclusively white controlled, and far too often hostile to inclusion.
There is an expediency, an existential urgency, in this singular call to action, because, Mr. Shamsud-Din, has been diagnosed with the onset of cancer, and this year, 2020, he will triumph as a black man to the age of eighty years old. But life as an African American visual artist remains too often a stressful, draining, struggle from one meagerly paid project to another. Still, Mr. Shamsud-Din, remains productive and resilient. But now the helter-skelter threat of Covid-19, and the senseless, heartbreaking, most recent murders of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and so many other souls, has outraged the world, and made transparent the fragility of all our lives. Yet in times like these, Mr. Shamsud-Din’s art, which reveals the truth, beauty and humanity in Black bodies and voices, is even more significant. Indeed, how can Black Lives Matter if African American history and artistically positive images are not present in all our lives and communities?
All who invest ten dollars or more into this GOFUNDME FOR MASTER ARTIST, ISAKA SHAMSUD-DIN, will receive a postcard of a new painting created by Mr. Shamsud-Din. Those able to invest $1000 or more will receive a signed print, limited edition, of the number who have invested at that level. These gifts of gratitude will be mailed to each investor within one year after the goal amount is achieved. Any and all investments are graciously appreciated, for if you step up to this diverse and inclusive formation of humanity you will help break through centuries' of barriers put in place by gatekeepers who both benefit from, and help maintain an unjust and unfair caste system.
You will enable, Mr. Shamsud-Din, due to age, pre-existing condition of cancer, to quarantine as long as needed. And empower him with the revolutionary freedom to expend his energy in the next decade, painting, sculpting and drawing with dignity. Instead of fading into obscurity and poverty, not unlike too many Blues artists whose music was revered, and appropriated, but were denied the fruit of their creativity and labor to even live a decent life.
[Please note: The culmination of Mr. Shamsud-Din's works due to your support will be shared in a website gallery for the world community to gaze upon, learn from, and celebrate.]
Isaka Shamsud-Din's art embodies the spirit of rarely shared history of African Americans in the Northwest in particular (Part of the Great Migration: see Isabel Wilkerson's "Warmth of Other Suns"), at the intersection of Black Americans in the United States and Blacks throughout the global African Diaspora. For more than six decades Mr. Shamsud-Din’s art has been exhibited in colleges, museums, and his murals have graced the walls of buildings in his home city of, Portland, Oregon, especially in the recently gentrified formerly African American community of Albina.
One can learn a great deal about his artwork by simply Googling his name, Isaka Shamsud-Din, here is a brief origin his-story:
He is one of fourteen children from the Allen family. Mrs. Geneva Allen, and their ten children at the time, fled from Queen City, Texas when a lynch mob abducted his father, Isaac Allen, from their isolated tenant farm in a midnight raid. Beaten and left for dead, tied to a tree in a place called, Bowie Hill, he escaped and traveled to Vanport, Oregon’s second largest city, in 1947. He worked furiously, and sent for his family who joined him six months later, only to lose everything the next year in the historic Vanport flood of May 30, 1948.
Discovering his artistic talent at an early age, all his life Mr. Shamsud-Din has honed his skills as an artist. In 1965 he joined in the Civil Rights Movement, serving as Field Secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Stuttgart, Arkansas, where he helped establish a Freedom School, registered Black residents to vote, and led successful desegregation of public accommodations. He met and worked with John Lewis, Cleve Sellers, Julian Bond, Mary Frances Berry, and Marion Barry, who worked at the SNCC national headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Becoming friends and associates with, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) - Alabama Project; and Charlie Cobb - Mississippi Project. He was one of six instructors who initiated the Black Studies Program at San Francisco State in 1966.
Beginning in 1977 he created several mural projects in the Portland Albina community in which he hired and mentored young Black artists. Over the next 20 years he recruited, hired, and trained over 40 artists, professionals, and youth apprentices, creating memorable murals and super graphics. He has worked in Portland Public schools with third graders through high school, teaching students self-expression, and how to creatively tell their stories. In 2003 he established the African American Visual Arts Scholarship that has helped African American art majors attend and graduate from Portland State University. In thirteen maximum security prisons throughout Washington State, including Walla Walla, and McNeil Island, Mr. Shamsud-Din conducted residencies, teaching inmates how to paint murals, sharing his art, and his life story. He has taught drawing, painting, and mural painting for forty years at major universities.
Police brutality devastated the Allen family. In 1972 Mr. Shamsud-Din’s oldest brother, Freddy Lee (Always stylish and flamboyant, he had changed his name to, Tony Savage, as a declaration against the way he was treated as a black man in America), at the age of 37, was beaten to death in a Birmingham, Alabama jail after being stopped for a minor traffic infraction. Then on October 27, 1974, Mr. Shamsud-Din’s youngest brother, Kenneth Allen, age 24, was shot to death by undercover policemen in Portland. A protest march in downtown Portland in which even then Portland Trailblazer, Bill Walton participated, did not sway a grand jury from finding his murder another justifiable homicide.
Currently, the Portland Art Museum hosts an exhibition of his works entitled “Rock of Ages” from the Museum’s Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection, through August 2021 (See virtual tour video below). In 2019 the City of Portland proclaimed Juneteenth, “Isaka Shamsud-Din Day,” in honor and recognition of the importance of his art to the soul and vitality of the City of Roses.
Thank you.
"Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world."
- James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"
There is an expediency, an existential urgency, in this singular call to action, because, Mr. Shamsud-Din, has been diagnosed with the onset of cancer, and this year, 2020, he will triumph as a black man to the age of eighty years old. But life as an African American visual artist remains too often a stressful, draining, struggle from one meagerly paid project to another. Still, Mr. Shamsud-Din, remains productive and resilient. But now the helter-skelter threat of Covid-19, and the senseless, heartbreaking, most recent murders of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and so many other souls, has outraged the world, and made transparent the fragility of all our lives. Yet in times like these, Mr. Shamsud-Din’s art, which reveals the truth, beauty and humanity in Black bodies and voices, is even more significant. Indeed, how can Black Lives Matter if African American history and artistically positive images are not present in all our lives and communities?
All who invest ten dollars or more into this GOFUNDME FOR MASTER ARTIST, ISAKA SHAMSUD-DIN, will receive a postcard of a new painting created by Mr. Shamsud-Din. Those able to invest $1000 or more will receive a signed print, limited edition, of the number who have invested at that level. These gifts of gratitude will be mailed to each investor within one year after the goal amount is achieved. Any and all investments are graciously appreciated, for if you step up to this diverse and inclusive formation of humanity you will help break through centuries' of barriers put in place by gatekeepers who both benefit from, and help maintain an unjust and unfair caste system.
You will enable, Mr. Shamsud-Din, due to age, pre-existing condition of cancer, to quarantine as long as needed. And empower him with the revolutionary freedom to expend his energy in the next decade, painting, sculpting and drawing with dignity. Instead of fading into obscurity and poverty, not unlike too many Blues artists whose music was revered, and appropriated, but were denied the fruit of their creativity and labor to even live a decent life.
[Please note: The culmination of Mr. Shamsud-Din's works due to your support will be shared in a website gallery for the world community to gaze upon, learn from, and celebrate.]
Isaka Shamsud-Din's art embodies the spirit of rarely shared history of African Americans in the Northwest in particular (Part of the Great Migration: see Isabel Wilkerson's "Warmth of Other Suns"), at the intersection of Black Americans in the United States and Blacks throughout the global African Diaspora. For more than six decades Mr. Shamsud-Din’s art has been exhibited in colleges, museums, and his murals have graced the walls of buildings in his home city of, Portland, Oregon, especially in the recently gentrified formerly African American community of Albina.
One can learn a great deal about his artwork by simply Googling his name, Isaka Shamsud-Din, here is a brief origin his-story:
He is one of fourteen children from the Allen family. Mrs. Geneva Allen, and their ten children at the time, fled from Queen City, Texas when a lynch mob abducted his father, Isaac Allen, from their isolated tenant farm in a midnight raid. Beaten and left for dead, tied to a tree in a place called, Bowie Hill, he escaped and traveled to Vanport, Oregon’s second largest city, in 1947. He worked furiously, and sent for his family who joined him six months later, only to lose everything the next year in the historic Vanport flood of May 30, 1948.
Discovering his artistic talent at an early age, all his life Mr. Shamsud-Din has honed his skills as an artist. In 1965 he joined in the Civil Rights Movement, serving as Field Secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Stuttgart, Arkansas, where he helped establish a Freedom School, registered Black residents to vote, and led successful desegregation of public accommodations. He met and worked with John Lewis, Cleve Sellers, Julian Bond, Mary Frances Berry, and Marion Barry, who worked at the SNCC national headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Becoming friends and associates with, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) - Alabama Project; and Charlie Cobb - Mississippi Project. He was one of six instructors who initiated the Black Studies Program at San Francisco State in 1966.
Beginning in 1977 he created several mural projects in the Portland Albina community in which he hired and mentored young Black artists. Over the next 20 years he recruited, hired, and trained over 40 artists, professionals, and youth apprentices, creating memorable murals and super graphics. He has worked in Portland Public schools with third graders through high school, teaching students self-expression, and how to creatively tell their stories. In 2003 he established the African American Visual Arts Scholarship that has helped African American art majors attend and graduate from Portland State University. In thirteen maximum security prisons throughout Washington State, including Walla Walla, and McNeil Island, Mr. Shamsud-Din conducted residencies, teaching inmates how to paint murals, sharing his art, and his life story. He has taught drawing, painting, and mural painting for forty years at major universities.
Police brutality devastated the Allen family. In 1972 Mr. Shamsud-Din’s oldest brother, Freddy Lee (Always stylish and flamboyant, he had changed his name to, Tony Savage, as a declaration against the way he was treated as a black man in America), at the age of 37, was beaten to death in a Birmingham, Alabama jail after being stopped for a minor traffic infraction. Then on October 27, 1974, Mr. Shamsud-Din’s youngest brother, Kenneth Allen, age 24, was shot to death by undercover policemen in Portland. A protest march in downtown Portland in which even then Portland Trailblazer, Bill Walton participated, did not sway a grand jury from finding his murder another justifiable homicide.
Currently, the Portland Art Museum hosts an exhibition of his works entitled “Rock of Ages” from the Museum’s Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection, through August 2021 (See virtual tour video below). In 2019 the City of Portland proclaimed Juneteenth, “Isaka Shamsud-Din Day,” in honor and recognition of the importance of his art to the soul and vitality of the City of Roses.
Thank you.
"Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world."
- James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"
Organizer and beneficiary
Rosemary Banks
Organizer
Clementon, NJ
Isaka Shamsud-Din
Beneficiary
