Dreaming of an Artful Atlanta
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old. They grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” –Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As a boy I did not dream of being an artist, largely due to the fact that I did not have art classes in the Catholic schools I attended, yet I had an artful life growing up in New York City in a Jamaica, Queens neighborhood in the 1960s and ‘70s.
In middle school, I had a paper route and delivered the newspaper to one of the Heath Brothers, legendary Jazz musicians, and I became friends with Percy Heath’s son Stuart. I also hung out with a neighborhood friend named Marcus Miller, who became an international jazz and R&B bass player.
The Jim Rouse Theatre for the Performing Arts at Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Maryland.
Closer to home, my sister Donna took ballet lessons at a neighbor’s house and applied to attend the Performing Arts High School – made famous by the T.V. show FAME. When our family moved to Columbia, M.D., I attended an integrated open space public high school (Wilde Lake HS) and I had a girlfriend named Famebridge who played the leading lady role in the school performance of a “Raisin in the Sun”. A decade later, Wilde Lake H.S. produced a graduate and actor named Ed Norton, who helped create a Performing Arts wing at the school in honor of his grandfather Jim Rouse.
Atiba Mbiwan with his cousin Tracy Camilla Johns. Photo courtesy of the Author.
My parents took us to see concerts (Jackson Five at Radio City Music Hall), plays (“Purlie” on Broadway), dance performances (Alvin Ailey) and festivals, but I had no music, drawing, or theatre classes before heading off to college at Brown University, which had the most creative curriculum (due to no core requirements) among the most established private universities in America.
I began college by taking an English class called “Invisible Man – Inside Out” where we dissected Ralph Ellison’s classic novel and it stimulated my imagination. The following year I took a music course “Sounds of Awareness” that was taught by Brother Ah, a classically trained musician (born as Robert Northern) who left the orchestra world to become an ethnomusicologist. He encouraged me to study abroad in Nigeria at the University of Lagos in 1980 and that allowed me to visit the renowned musician Fela Kuti at his compound and again at his club.
After rejecting my efforts to recruit her to Brown, my beloved cousin Tracy Camila Johns decided to skip college after graduating from high school to pursue her acting career. Like so many actors, she hustled and took a part-time security job at NYU where she met a graduate student named Spike Lee. That connection led to her being offered a role in his first major movie – “She’s Gotta Have It” – and Nola Darling stole the show!
For the past 25 years, I have worked in philanthropy – first at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation (five years) and then at the Zeist Foundation (20 years) with a personal goal to find ways to support arts based organizations because I have “seen the mountaintop” and it is full of creative souls! My professional life began as a high school Math teacher in an arts-based school and it forced me to be creative so I made my students watch the Disney short movie “Donald Duck in Math Magic Land” because it illuminates the connection between math and music.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library aligns with Zeist Foundation’s focus on arts & education. Photo courtesy of the Author.
It is crystal clear to me that art classes are not necessary to produce artists, but they expand learning by allowing students to be creative, to express themselves, and to apply the disciplines of math, language, history and science. Beyond the school building we need arts organizations that provide opportunities for learning, serving and leading for both young & old.
At 66 years young, I am dreaming of a new & better America where arts are valued, supported and promoted in school, in homes and in community spaces for everyone to enjoy, embrace, and elevate. My grandson DeSean just started middle school at Utopian Academy of the Arts and I know he will have extraordinary learning experiences that most other Georgia students cannot even imagine. We need an arts & culture ecosystem that allows dreams to come true for all young people so let’s rally support for the Arts Capital Atlanta campaign and create an artful Atlanta.
