SPEAKER_02 1:45

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Hilltop Glove Podcast. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Tyrone Jeter. Mr. Jeter is a world-class artist, painter, sculptor, illustrator, and teacher. Recently retired associate professor of art at Benedict College, Jeter grew up in Anniston, Alabama, during a time defined by strict segregation laws and social justice. He received his Master's of Fine Arts from Ohio University in 1978 with the emphasis on painting and drawing. An exceptional draftsman, his portraits are sensitive, timeless, and masterfully executed. In 1979, Mr. Jeter relocated to Nigeria, where he lived for seven years. While there, he drew and painted among the locals of northern Nigeria. During this time, he created numerous paintings that captured the richness and depth of the cultures of the region. During this time, he created numerous paintings that captured the richness and depth of the cultures of the region. This experience taught him to understand the natures of life in a society where life and nature are sometimes both hard and cruel. After returning to the U.S. in 1987, he began teaching at the University of Akron, where he transformed his experience in Nigeria into the most powerful work of his career. Mr. Jeter's works have been displayed at the Columbia Museum of Art, Florence County Museum, and Waterfront Gallery in Charleston. Also, the Center for Afro-American Artists in Boston. Thank you for joining us today. How are you?

SPEAKER_03 3:26

Oh, I'm good. Nice to see you again, also. She didn't tell you she's my former student.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

I didn't put that in the bio. I did. I did. We were gonna come across that.

SPEAKER_03 3:37

But you're a good student, though.

SPEAKER_02 3:38

I don't tell people everything I've done, but you know. Pull them everything up then.

unknown 3:43

Fair.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right. Yes, Mr. Cheetah, Mr. Jeter used to be my professor at Benedict College, and I gave him the hardest time out of everyone. I can say that. I created a rebellion against him. When all the students, when he wanted to submit our work, I'm like, you guys, he can't fail us all if we don't do our homework. And literally, you know, he kind of did. So it didn't work. That's just called wish fact. It did not work. Yeah, you did. You taught us a lesson.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

You know, pick which systems you try to put down.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

Yeah. That was the early, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. I was just like, you know, all of us can come together. It wasn't a lot in our class. I'm like, but we can all come together.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Together, some kind of unity. It didn't work. Union of people.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Yeah, we couldn't break, we couldn't crack him. Okay, so just to get started, we'd like to give our guests a little bit of information about your background and upbringing. So can you tell us a little bit more about your childhood? Or what inspired you as a child?

SPEAKER_03 4:40

I think I guess like most of us, I thought I had a unique childhood, probably didn't. Also, almost all the women during that period of time was domestic workers. Most of the men were well laborers, they did various handyman type of things, you know. I I grew up surrounded by women. You see, you see, the bulk of my work is is about women. I was at a very early age, I was taught to respect, you know, women. And that's even in the South where it wasn't always that way. That's the way I was actually raised to respect women. And sometimes it was emphasized through the hand.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

They pinch you or they hit you, or yeah.

SPEAKER_03 5:20

Oh, smack you, slap on the wrist. Yeah, but it was all it was all in fun, I guess, you know. Anyway, my mother, like I said, she was she was a domestic worker most of her life, third-grade education, probably one of the most intuitive women you've ever meet in your life. You know, she did a a lot to keep me on that path to go the right direction. She was uh a lady who had three times, no fault of hers. She left all of them, you know. What's her zodiac sign? But she was very wise, you know, to leave all these people because they were not really good people. And um, so um at one point she decided that she'd had enough Alabama and she packed up a bag, left us with my grand, my grandparents to call for Ohio. And at that point, you it's it's what they call that underground, the uh railroad, you know. And she went there, stayed with her relatives, yeah. That's mostly where it was done. And very not too far from the state line, you know, Kentucky, Dayton, Ohio. Okay so we stayed there. She stayed there for about uh two months, then sent for us. My sister, my oldest sister was already married and out of the house. She was in Germany at the time, I think. And my middle sister, she she also came. So we we moved there. I started school at uh Dayton Roosevelt High School. Are we getting into how I got involved with the art source?

SPEAKER_04 6:35

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 6:36

Okay. Art for me started with my sister, the oldest one. I don't know if you've seen these comic books where these little things they draw me. No, no, no. If in these comic books, there were usually you could find these little images, little contests, they call it draw me contests. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. It was a lie. It was nothing that you were not going to win any prize. They wanted you to uh subscribe to it so they could make money off of it, you know. So my sister used to sit at the table and draw those all the time. I used to watch her. And that was my first exposure to any kind of art, creative arts, you know, visual arts. The second influence was you ever hear of uh Sweet Daddy Grace? Oh my god, you guys are young. Look, they're older than me, and I'm like, Sweet Daddy Grace was an evangelist out of Harlem.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:22

God had a hundred thousand people that followed him, super rich. They always get rich off of that, you know. So and what he would do periodically, he would send his ministers all over the country and they would come to start new churches. So one showed up in Anderson, Alabama. My grandmother and them got caught up in it. And they sort of adopted all of his meals, he would come to the house and have his meals there, you know, as he built this church. People couldn't see that, could you?

SPEAKER_04 7:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:52

They couldn't see that. I forgot about that. Anyway, anyway. That was air quotes. I'll say in quote. What really was was really interesting about this guy, his first day he got there, he asked my grandmother if he could if he could pay her back through his trade. You know, so she said, sure. So they had these old metal cabinets in the kitchen. This guy pulled out paintbrushes and he painted birds and flowers and all kinds of things on the on this uh, and I used to watch him. I would sit there and just watch him do it. I was just fascinated. I was just looking at theround about six, seven, something like that. You know, I used to watch them all the time. So that was it, the second influence. When my mother took us to um Ohio, I got lucky. I ran into a really she was not a good teacher, you know, but she knew what she was doing. She chose people that she thought had possibilities. So I didn't want to. At the time, I was I was dating a young lady who could drive a car, and I couldn't. So I was more involved with trying to learn to drive than to do art. Her class, and I was gonna drop her class so that I could learn to drive because my girlfriend drove. And she called my mother and told my mother that she never talked to my mother before in the life. She called and said, You shouldn't let him drop. Of course. If you have to, I'll help you to get him a driver's training, you know. And so I never knew that for years when my mother finally told me that she had called her, you know. And that's those are the ways I stayed in in painting, I mean, enjoying classes there. And that's how I I really should be out of art now. Because there was nothing in my past that would indicate I would become an artist. Because I mean, there was nobody of professionals around me when I was growing up, maybe one art teacher, but there was nobody that would have I could have looked at and been inspired by, you know. But once my mother learned that I wanted to do it, she gave me no peace. She supported me every step of the way. She's a she's a great woman.

SPEAKER_02 9:50

So you are the only boy, or you the youngest two? That means I was, you know, I'm just reliving your story.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

We talk to all kinds of people in this program, so we're always trying to see where people fit in the spectrum. You know, we've got signs, and it's kind of comparison to our own lives, I think. We gotta see how people fit in there and how it influences them and such. But you know, I a lot of times we record these in many different venues, but today we're actually in uh 701 Whaley, uh Contemporary Center for Arts, and we're in the space upstairs that you have a lot of your work in, and you're actually working on some pieces off to the side, and we've been kind of watching you as we set up. You know, this is one of the things that doesn't come across on podcasts, but I feel like I kind of have to talk about the space and what your art looks like if people are not familiar with it. Um, because most of this is kind of monochromatic. It's like it's it's uh charcoal and chalk and pencil and I don't know, maybe some pastels as you as you go through it. And then some of it gets into almost an installation piece. It's different elements and paper and and old things that are sitting in front of the paintings, bicycles, and it's really you know, I was walking around with my son before this, and just you know, there's just there's a lot in every piece. And it's uh it's really enjoyable to go through. And you know, it's not they're not usually pretty pleasant scenes. A lot of it is thunderstorms and things going on in the background. Um it's very captivating. Every single one of these pieces, it just kind of pulls you in a bit.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Very much enjoy your work. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

I'm hoping that it's it's not gloomy because it's not leading to that.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

No, it's not.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

It's captivating. It engulfs you. It kind of like you don't just you can't just look at one piece. You just you just really just take your time and try to depict, like decipher. Okay, does he have any hidden messages in this in this piece? Yeah, that's hidden messages in each piece.

SPEAKER_03 11:56

Oh, yeah. Well, the first thing when you look at my art, it insists that you feel.

SPEAKER_04 12:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:03

You can't walk past my work and not feel something. I think that the way our culture is, it sort of separates us from one and the other. I think we lose a certain amount of our humanity. My mother, when I was growing up, my mother taught me that a couple of stories. Come home from school when I was in college, and um upstairs and then in uh in my bedroom just painting something. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, I said, Well, I'm just sort of playing around with it. She said, Well, I don't I don't feel nothing from it. And I give her this funny drawing, but it doesn't move me.

SPEAKER_00 12:39

That was the spark.

SPEAKER_03 12:41

This is my mother telling me something like she's about to encourage me. I said, What do you mean? She said, Well, our family feels things, and I said, Okay. I said, So what are you trying to say? She said, Well, I'm trying to say I don't feel anything when I look at that. And I said, Well, this art world doesn't like that. She said, Then who are you? And and now I'm really lost in this conversation because I don't know how to handle this, you know. Right. I never thought that deeply before, you know. Right. I told her, I'm your son. She said, No, my son feels and just left the room, left you sitting there. Call him out. What I did was took that thing and put it aside and went back and started again. I knew that uh she would give me no peace for one thing and she was right, you know. The second thing she she taught me was that all artistic static. Okay. She would she would come by when I'm working, and she would she would ask me what I was doing again. That was our lead-in. I knew something was coming. She had been thinking about something. So I told her, Well, I'm just I'm just working, you know. And she said, Well, I'm looking at who is it gonna help? She said, Who is it gonna help? It's just a work pain. I'm trying to learn how to do this. She said, Well, it still could help somebody. And she said, Well, I said, Well, I don't know. She said, Well, it ain't gonna help nobody help nobody, you shouldn't be doing it, and just left me there, you know. So that was another lesson that I need to think about who was I talking to, you know, and the rest of my my career was spent trying to learn to make a universal statement.

SPEAKER_02 14:06

I can say that you did help figure out their why, because I remember being a student in your class, every time you would ask me a question, it would I would say, I don't know. And you were like, You do know, Tamaya, and I'm like, No, I don't. But I never like slowed down and processed it or even thought about the why.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Was it gonna sometimes we know why, but we don't know it from like like a logical way, you know? It's not something that we can verbally, we know why we just can't you. That's why we're doing the art.

SPEAKER_04 14:38

Yeah, it's a process of figuring out how to verbalize it to the world, and that's what it was.

SPEAKER_03 14:41

You helped me verbalize things since you keep bringing up. Uh oh. Say this. No, no, it's nothing bad. But when I got the Benedict, it was just a different experience. I've never quite experienced anything like that. I mean, I was first told that the syllabus that I tried to teach you guys was too much for you, that you guys wouldn't be able to handle it, and I should uh dumb it down a bit. Didn't say that, but that's what she meant. So I revoked against that. That was the first time I got it in trouble in the department when I did that. After that, I was always in a little bit of trouble. So I refused to refuse to do that. And the second thing I had to do was not only get your attention, I had to get your respect.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:25

And and for what I had seen, students just got over. They got over continuously, and I knew I could teach them if I couldn't get them to listen. So I chose a different path. Everybody else was all friendly with students. It was like he was brothers and sisters and all that. I took a path that I'll eat you alive. Yeah. You really did. The only way I could get you to listen. Yeah. I remember when Samford was in my class, it was the same type of thing. You know, Sanford, anything I told Sanford to do, Sanford had to question me. Rock bottom two as he calls himself. The same thing. I was in a constant fight trying to get them to listen, you know? And the only way I could do it was just to not take any nonsense, you know. Yeah. I've never taught like that before in my life, but I didn't have a choice. But that was I taught at Benedict. You know, later on after you guys left, every time I reached a point where I either retired or just get in because I was tired.

SPEAKER_04 16:18

You were tired of me.

SPEAKER_03 16:20

Yeah, I was forcing. Every you know, I got better students at times, but it was still too many students. They were they were not getting anything out of these classes. You know, and to pay that much money and not be able to get into your field, it was horrendous, horrendous. I'm probably gonna be in trouble.

unknown 16:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Anyway, I mean, it's not just them, that's kind of higher education as a whole right now, as they've gotten really good at that machinery. Gosh, I mean, trying to go to college for fine arts to me, like, you know, because I I went for graphic design, which is a curriculum, you know, like there's a there's a thing there. But um, I can't even imagine trying to build a program inside of that environment. It's about coin now.

SPEAKER_04 17:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

We were going to school, it was a little bit different because it was so difficult for us to get in school. Now almost anybody can get in. That's the thing you can stay that you can get in. I was the uh second person in the in all of my family to go to college. Okay. And I went to college, my mother again. My mother works but worked for this white lady as a domestic worker. God must have been 10 years. When I came of age to go to college, she went and went to see the lady, and she said, I want you to send my give my son of college. He had to do it on his own. She said, Oh, I I really can't. I mean, I got three boys myself, and I just don't have the money to do it. This lady I owned this big factory, a big huge company, she was doing just fine. So my mother said, Well, you know that I worked for you all these years. You never paid me social security. Anything you know that money you didn't pay me, just send my son to school for just one year. That's how I went to college. My mother.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Wow. My mother was so much. She sacrificed a lot. She was a big thing.

SPEAKER_03 18:00

My mother sounds like an amazing person. She was an amazing woman. I tell everybody about it, you know. Yeah. When the trade rep for the world, when I lost it, it was like, well, anyway. What was your real question you asked me? I don't even remember.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

We were just trying you got to this place and how you learned the things, and I feel like we we're doing that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:20

He was asking about the show, I think, the content of the show. Sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Almost everything I do, it has something in it, you know. And like that show at the museum, Enduring Spirit. He had wanted to put an S on the internet word, but that would have made it, you know.

SPEAKER_04 18:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:35

And I didn't want that. And what it was an opportunity, a chance for me to try to pay tribute to women in my in my family, in my past, and in my neighborhood. And so it was a chance to talk about the things they had they had done, the influence they had on my life. I mean, when we were growing up, they caught me doing something five blocks down the street. They would grab me by my ear and pull that switch off that tree and whip my behind. And you don't say you wait to my so I'm telling my mother what you did. You don't do that. They took you straight home.

unknown 19:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

Say, girl, you don't know. I had to, I had to whip this boy's behind today, you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

I took care of it for you. But if you need to do it again, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

Ain't no taking care of it. It ain't no taking care of it. She, my mother said, Boy, you done embarrassed the family out there. What is wrong with you? Get in the house. She's not before you go, go get that switch. And you gotta beat it again. You have to go, yeah, and get on top of second one. That was for embarrassing. You did something wrong. You got whipped for that one, but now you're getting whipped for embarrassing family. So she would send you out to uh get that switch. And you know how we are, we'll come back with a little thing like that. She'd send you right back out, get a second one, you know. And she was she would send you out to get three switches. When she got them all back, she would braid them. You thought you were being slick, she would braid those switches, you know. But they never never hit me in a place where I would ever show what that would really hurt me. You know, like if I had short pants on, she would whip me on my behind, but she wouldn't hit me on the legs. And that's that big painting down there with the lady with it with the branch in her hand, that's what that's about.

SPEAKER_04 20:08

Really?

SPEAKER_03 20:09

You know, James Brown put that uh song, Mama Come Here Quick, uh, and bring in that lick and stick. Uh-huh. That's what she's got there. She's like Mother Nature, and she's looking at the at all of these people, the things we've been doing. Just trying to decide whether she's going to whip our behinds or she's going to give us another chance, you know.

SPEAKER_02 20:26

Give us our grace.

SPEAKER_03 20:27

Yeah. So this show here is primarily about uh climate change. Really? Yeah, it's primarily about climate change. That's why you see all these things dealing with skies and sure and isolation of kids. But what I was trying to do is I wanted to put a different spin on it. What I wanted to talk about was that if parents don't take it as serious, your kids are in serious trouble because this culture exploits children. The whole world exploits children. If there's nobody to protect them, they get exploited. You know, so and if we don't stop this thing, we're in trouble. Because I don't see nature as being mad, angry at us, you know. I think what she is doing is resetting. We've almost destroyed the world. What she's doing is resetting this thing back, putting it back the way it was. And if we if we get hurt by that, that's on us, you know. We did this thing to ourselves. But at the same time, too, what the positive thing I get from this, I try to put out there is that when you go back, you look at the first time the world was so destroyed, dinosaurs are wiped out, you know. Only a few actually survived, you know, things like that. But children will survive. We know we science has taught us there's so much in this this head, this brain that we don't touch. We don't even know what it's for. You know, it's just sitting there. What if these kids? Yeah, then you've got a whole new thing, ball game going here, you know. This one here, right there on that corner right there, that's what that one's about. It's about a little boy that's tapped into his it into his brain. That part that nobody ever sees. And it's starting fires. You know, this little girl up here, the one that's with the hair going up in the air like that. Yeah, she has power some nature, move things, make her hair shoot up in here like that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

So there are several of these where the hair just kind of turns into these flowy waves, kind of an energetic thing going on. There's several of them that that happens with.

SPEAKER_03 22:23

That's another story. When I was back in the 80s, I lived in uh West Africa. My wife was Nigerian, and both my girls were born there. So I lived lived there for seven years, and it's not a problem. Okay, nobody teases you about your hair going all kinds of ways and that you know, nobody does. So my kids would get their hair washed, they go outside and play and let it dry faster, they said, you know. We got back to the to the States and we're living in Akron, and my daughter, mother, her mother washes her hair. She said, Mama go ride the bike until uh my hair dries. She went outside and the kids just harassed her mercilessly. And to me, it was like a loss of innocence, you know. Sure. And so it it was I bet it was 10 years before I even brought that back in my head and start doing it with the hair. That's what I mean by the subconscious. Yeah, everything I do, it depends on what the subconscious tells me. Like if it doesn't talk to me, I don't do anything. Yeah, I just I will just sit around and lump it out, you know. Yeah, watch TV all day, that's what I'd be doing. But the everything touches me, everything affects me. You know, my mother taught me that, like we said, about emotions and stuff like that. So everything touches me. So something will I'll see something, or someone would say something, and it would trigger this thing, it will start thinking about it, and it can keep me away. Doing that, you know, and right it will finally it would run something past me. If it's a good idea, I'll sit and wait still until I find the right centerpiece. You know, if it's not, it's part of your mind, throws it out, so that's stupid. Go away. But it comes back if it's still there. Yeah, it will come back slightly changed. You know, I trust that completely, completely, because I don't do sketches. I build my all these things are built. As much as I told you guys to do sketches, I used to I used to hate doing sketches, and Mr.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

Gita was like, a true artist just does it. Just put your hand on the paper and just draw. And I'm like, what do you mean?

SPEAKER_03 24:24

Sure. Just draw. Yeah, I grew up sketching. Once I found out how I worked, then I could I could throw that aside, you know. Right. And even till today, I don't sketch. Everything in here is built by waiting for that voice and then finding that centerpiece that set that whole composition on edge, you know. And then I was started, and all these things are built around it.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Well, how vulnerable do you have to be to actually like for each piece? Like, each piece of how vulnerable do you have to be with each piece?

SPEAKER_03 24:54

Well, my mother taught me that you can feel and protect yourself at the same time. You don't have to just go into any kind of relationship where you're just so wide open, people abuse you. If somebody's abusing you, get up and get the f out of there, you know? You don't have to sit there and take that. And she, I mean, her thing was that you trusted people until they until they blew it, you know. I mean, you don't trust them with your life. You don't give a guy a life and say, I'll trust you not to kill me, and you know he's gonna kill you now.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

Assume the good until you've shown otherwise.

SPEAKER_03 25:24

Yeah, but that's that's where that's the way I was raising. My work is that way because of that, you know. I don't I don't have any problem with because and the way I work, whether stuff is good or bad, whether it's artistically sound, I don't know. Somebody else would make that determination. No, it's but the thing is though, because the way I work, I can change, I can change direction just like that. I can't pop my finger very well, you know what I mean. I can change I can change direction just like that. And all this stuff is results of uh of that. Like you said, that bottle, that big green bottle. I found that bottle in an antique shop. Not antique, it's just a junk shop, they call antique. So I found that bottle, it's hand hand blown. And it was just a nice bottle, so I bought it, and I bet I had the thing seven, eight years before I even did anything with it. And it was been on the you guys used to draw that bottle. Still life. So this thing was sitting in my studio, it'd been there for years, you know. And then I bought that little stand for some reason, don't know why. And that those two things sat in there another year. You know, and I I have quite a bit of junk in my in my studio and house, you know. So one day I went to get off the floor off the floor. So I just set it in that, excuse me, I set it, I set it in that in that stand there, and I saw a pregnant woman. Just like that, I just saw a pregnant woman. And then it it popped at me. What they're saying about everybody has to have a child. If you get pregnant, you can be two years old, you have to have the baby. And that little girl is up top. That's that's that's talking about that would make a child have a baby, even if she's raped or whatever, you know. So that's that's that's about abortion. All of her kids, I'm going to have to do more to that. I don't want them to be all pink. There are shades around. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

See, if you didn't explain that, we I wouldn't have thought that.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

No, I want them to be that's what it's about. That's what it's about. This one over here, the one in the middle, is about a drought. When I was in a in West Africa, I was in Clano one time, and this this guy told me, he said, uh, this car was built on a desert. And he said, uh every year they lose them out. They have to reclaim it. Takes it back. You can't beat nature. You can't beat it. You can put up all these things. Eventually, if you don't take care of nature, she takes care of you. So this was about that. I found that tree. I drew that in West Africa. It was in my drawer. I forgot it was even there. And I found that little old, little old frame looking thing there. I think it's a flower box or something. I had found that someplace years ago and just liked it, brought it into the studio, it stayed there. And then one day I was going to the drawer and I saw that, and I just, oh, that would work together. It made sense. So I went out and went and got that. Then I was out at some so-called antique shop once, and I ran across that column, and I I could just picture that column sitting underneath it. And the last thing, the last two things, I sit underneath there, there was a hole already there. And I was out walking around the lake, and I walked past that thing, and I just saw it and kept right on walking, got all the way home and stopped. I had to go back and get it. But I came back and dropped, and it was just perfect. And then the last thing I did just before I brought over here, I bought a hole and I dropped that branch in there. In real life, though, nature would grow that thing but right out, and she would grow that thing right back. That's the way nature works. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:42

It sounds like you do a lot of collecting things as you go along, and you find something that for some reason you're drawn to it, you don't even know why. And I'm thinking about this because very recently, like I just had to do a purge on my house because I just had all these random bits and bobs that just made it into my home for some reason. You know, they were they were things that a former employer had been decorating his office with and things that somebody else's grandfather, you know, just stuff that was energetically dense, but it wasn't mine.

SPEAKER_03 29:13

I built the storage room. I'm still paying for it, of course. But I built the storage room outside just so I could I could keep more stuff because I know this stuff is there for a reason.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Right. Yeah. And and you when you find like a faucet, you just you have like a reason that you need to turn around and go back and get it.

SPEAKER_03 29:29

Yeah, because it this thing popped in my head. When I when I saw that faucet on the road, it just popped in my head and was all rusted out, which is what I wanted, you know. And I saw it, I had no idea where the holding, I would have bought a different a bigger hold if I had to, but I just dropped it and was like, I keep stuff.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

That kind of sounds reminds me of like our next question. Like, what is your definition of the shared experience?

SPEAKER_03 29:52

What I'm doing now. This is the shared experience. You know, like like I was trying to say that I've been, I don't know why it was so difficult for me to understand how to make a universal statement to speak to any and everybody and get past the fact that these are black figures. I paint black figures because I know black people. And so I didn't always know how to talk to people. And during the 60s, I tried that thing of showing police and all that stuff, but I hated it.

unknown 30:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:17

Because what I believe is that if you scream at people, then stop listening. Yeah, you can't keep telling the guy, people did this, they did this. You got to show them some other things, you know, and make them come to that conclusion too. So I learned that those are lessons that build up over time, you know. So done this drawing, it was a triptych. It was in a showdown at Lake City. And down there, I think it was opening or something, you know. I went down for that. And I went back because I hadn't seen it since they hung it. I walked back by so I could see how they hung it, you know. And there must have been 15 people standing in front of it. Black, white, Hispanic, children, you name it. They were there. And they were discussing that piece. So I stopped and pretended that I was there to discuss it too. This was about domestic workers. Oh wow. And what was it called? The nation's last uh in-house in-house servant, I think, or something like that, you know. Anyway, I was listening to them, and everyone had a shared experience with that. Little girl said, Oh, I remember my mother used to come home. She used to bring these bologna sandwiches. We used to stay up all night just to eat that bologna, you know. And they were always, everybody started laughing, and everybody there had done that. And it's it's it's they could actually talk about that, and and and all of a sudden the light just went on. One other piece of it that show about uh pregnant women, these two women pregnant with this little boy in the middle. I don't know if you remember that one. That was that was a shared experience also, because we had to talk. The thing that the women mostly talk about was that the piece was was about a woman bringing women bringing children to the world, and how do you protect them? They gotta they especially a young black male, his life is in jeopardy from the time he gets into the world, you know. I'm not saying anything different about women, it's the same thing. They get shot more, although you guys are trying to catch up. Yeah, you shouldn't do that. Yeah, but so those for me is how I share experience, and I I try to find that thing that uh relate to. Now, I think I've succeeded, and I can tell you why. When I had the show at the at the museum, every day I went in there, security was waiting on me, and they gave me a running report on what happened during the show that day. I bet you every day I went through that, somebody had crying. And then people come through here, the same thing they say, bring tissues. You know, so they're they're getting the message that I'm talking about. Whether they are into climate change or not, they're getting the message, you know. I'm hoping they're into climate change, you know. But what you do is you you come up with your statement and you do as well as you can. You try to you try to find that peace that allows people to enter. You don't put something like a like a cop with a foot up in the air getting ready to stomp on a on a on a on a man, you know. You don't put something like that in there because they're not gonna look any longer. Right, right. You can't even look at that that long. It's uh it's a feudal message. And the one just one you see all the time, he's what he's painting a lot now, black love. That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. You would never see me do that. You know, I think they're just shades. Yeah, they're making men, women relationship, and it's like a shape. And people, oh, it's just so beautiful. It's crazy, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I try to avoid the obvious statement. I try to give them a chance to enter the work, I try to release them. If you if you look at these long enough, I don't I don't think anybody thinks they're gloomy.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

No, they're not. Yeah, they're very intense. And you know, um I mentioned the storms and stuff, but all of them are pretty much all portraits, also. Yeah, and they're and they're emotionally intense. Not really sad, but like like with the eyes are piercing. Like you look at some of these things and they're real people. And like like this one that's behind you right now, like now that we're talking about is climate change, you know, there's obvious like his shoulder is turning into uh like a smoke behind there, and and then what I interpret it's smokestacks in the background, but then he's also wearing a t-shirt, just got a T-Rex on the front of it. And so there's this distinction, you know, like I'm a CDM that's coming up. Right. And and you know, and the same kind of thing with with like you know, like his hair is spiky, but it is doing something energetic that is not what actually happens in the physical world. And and so it's it's like it does, it draws you in. It is very intense.

SPEAKER_03 34:40

And it's also like that electrical shock when hair starts when you hear it.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Right, right, like a static thing, yeah. And there's a lot of lightning, a lot of a lot of energy in all of this, actually.

SPEAKER_03 34:48

Um all that is just built. I get us, I get an idea. The idea that popped in here was about breathless, you know, and it popped in there, and it just sits there as it develops, you know. I find the right face. All these people here from uh uh Gambia, all of them on this side, all these black and white Gambians. I I was there for about six months. I'm going back. Husband's from there. That one back there talks about the bicycle, the tricycle. It just it's a simple concept is that it's a kid trapped outside, no one to come to get him. And there's an impending hurricane behind him. And the bike re-emphasized that point, there's nobody to come to get him. Mike has just been sitting there for years and rusted out. That's what that's talking about.

SPEAKER_02 35:36

Let's talk about the the shrines. The shrines, the altars and the shrines.

SPEAKER_03 35:43

Which one you consider the shrine?

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Hmm. I see shrines in everything nowadays.

SPEAKER_03 35:48

But choose the one you want to talk about, then what about the one at the back? The big one. The other one, another one, anyone you want. You know, so much to look at. You didn't reach your own stuff. I'm sorry, just teasing. I couldn't resist that.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

You like to pig.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Oh, I like teasing other teams. You know, you've got one on the opposite wall over there that's it's got a you know, an actual physical tree with the roots still attached, it's pulled out of the ground. And that connects the ground, and then it transforms into the painting that actually has the tree coming out of the person's head, and there's two jars and boxes on either side. I was very curious into that one.

SPEAKER_03 36:26

Oh, it's two of them over there. Like that. Oh there's two different ones on the on the other wall, right around the corner from there. Yeah, the big tall one, and there's one around the corner. Those two were um pretty much about the same time. I was trying to talk about the connection between uh man and nature. And I use the trees a lot for things like that, you know. I really like working with those trees, you know. And so I got to thinking about it, but if that's the case and we keep cutting down trees and destroying trees, yeah, what's gonna happen? So I decided I found these really those nice bottles, as at Goodwill, I think, you know. And I bought the bottles, I didn't know what I was gonna do with them. And then once I had done that piece, I ran across those bottles again. My work is it's never finished until it's out of the house, so and gone. You know, otherwise I'll keep working. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. So when I saw those bottles, I decided that what if I went underneath my sink and started picking things up underneath the sink and put it into the bottle. So I put some uh dishwasher. There was some disinfectant I found in there. Um there's a bunch of stuff. I don't even know what all this stuff was. I put it in the bottle. When you first put it, it's beautiful. It really is it's shiny and sparkling, you know. And about um two weeks later, it's that stuff, and it keeps getting worse. So this is what's a full circle. Yeah, that's that's very because we dump that stuff all over the place and it's killing everything. We don't even think about saving trees or anything, you know. No, they don't. Because I mean, every place you go, they just quack cracking trees and put up some prefabricated house so they can charge a small fortune for it.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

Something that's not gonna last 50 years.

SPEAKER_02 38:09

Like some advice for other artists that are struggling and trying not to conform. What is some advice that you would give them to stay true to themselves?

SPEAKER_03 38:21

That's what I did.

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Get a job.

SPEAKER_03 38:23

Like a not art job? Whatever pays your pays your bills. You know, something to liberate you into this process. If you're wise, if they're still young, go back to school, get your masters. Masters open up the uh university for you. And for an artist, that's the best possible job you can have. You teach, except for Benedict, you teach a couple days a week, and you have all that time to do your work. You there five days a week, so you have to really, really be prepared, you know. I actually like it when I first started because every once in a while you you see that light go on somebody's head, and boy, that teacher will die for that.

SPEAKER_04 38:56

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_03 38:58

Yeah, but um that allows you to do the work. You know, it is I don't care who you are, nobody does art, doesn't have money to eat and they pay nobody. You can't you can't survive like that, you know. So you're going to have to find some way to live and don't waste your time and your opportunities, you know. And the other thing too that hits me is that give up that time freely. We are very generous with that, you know. You can a a student, you can you can you would a student come up to you and ask you something, and you'll talk to them, you'll sit there and you talk the next hour as long as they're interested, you know. And then you would tell them that you say, Why don't you try this on your work, you know? Because most of the time I say, I tell them you should go nowhere without images of your work, you know. That's what these phones are for. So when you see the artist, if he's willing to look at your work, show it to him. And he would he would make comments. And at the same time, if he spends time with you, saying you should try this, he expects you to go do it. If you don't do it, then they'll come back. That meant we wasted you wasted our time, you know. So the kids that come back in another session. You you you use everything that's around you that's open, you know, that's going to help you, you know. But the main thing is to realize that this is a tough field. Most of the time you're by yourself. You know, you're going to be by yourself. You're not going to be able to make every part of it comes up. You're not going to be able to wear the finest clothes, you know, same all these strings that people buy, and you're better off keeping them on the bank than buying a new sweatshirt, you know. So that's the best thing you can do, is just get that job that allows you to do it, because I work part-time for anything just to keep from taking a full-time job. The only reason I took a full-time job was because I had children. You know, so I had children, it just changed the whole thing, you know. So then I went back to teaching. I've worked, you name it, I've worked that job. I worked one job where they clean these big old 50-gallon drug drums. Yeah, the big barrels. They used to clean them, yeah, uh big metal things, heavy as a dickens, you know. They would paint them, you have to sit set them up, load trucks, you know, and that's by hand. That's by hand. You just had to stack them three high. You know, I know you don't think I could do that, but I mean, anything that allows me to be able to do the art.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:08

It's that time, that extra time to put into it with that commodity. Yeah, but you do it, you know what I'm talking about. You know what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

You can't do it and have 40-hour week jobs.

SPEAKER_03 41:16

You're done. All these things you're doing, somebody got to be paying you something. Yeah. You know, because you you I mean, you have to eat because if you don't eat, you are not gonna do any art. Yeah. What anyone's saying. Right. It's it's over. You know, so that's that's about all you can actually tell them and just work, work, work and listen to anything anyone tells you. Don't have to do it. I mean, you can have a drunk off the street and tell you something about your work, you should listen. If he thought enough of you to say something about it, you should listen. Now you weigh it, you look back and forth what he's saying, and if what he's saying is true, because you should know, you do it. Otherwise, you think him. But that's what you should do. You should never dismiss people.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

I mean, I mean, you know, human experience and emotion is not something that you know, like there's there's yeah, there's no, yeah, there's no tiered system to that. Like any any random person can experience the most deepest, intensest things.

SPEAKER_03 42:11

Especially if you're pretending to be talking to people.

unknown 42:13

Right.

SPEAKER_03 42:13

Yeah. If I don't listen, then I'm a I'm one of the biggest liars you ever see in your life. Because all I want to do is communicate. I don't normally I don't go to a lot of things, you know. I never had any use for it, you know. I'd rather be in the studio most of the time. And I don't have the great raps that I'm sure you run into a ton of people with great raps, you've learned to ignore them, you know. A lot of them. But I'm not I'm I'm not I'm not like that, you know, and this is a chore for me. So you just you just learn how to how to do just enough to run your career, you know, which I'm I'm not that great at that. Also tell them to learn that to um to run their career. Know social media, learn to understand it, how to use it for your good. And I think probably ignore Facebook. Facebook is not good for this, you know, bad for it. So just ignore Facebook, go into something else, you know, and just learn to use that computer because you're gonna need it, you know. I don't know what else I would I would tell you about that, but the main thing is just to believe that you can do this, you know, no matter what, no matter what anyone tells you, you can do it. I've had people say some awful things to me. When I first went to college, I had a teacher, he gave us to go out class twice a week. Usually told us to go out and I think about seven to ten paintings, okay, just small things, see what you can do. So I drew seven to ten black people mostly, you know. So I brought it back in and he praised it. And one student, one white kid said, Well, why is he just painting black people? And the teacher switched. Yeah, why are you doing that? You you should paint more diverse things. I sat there and I said, Man, speak now. Let me tell him why. I said, I'm looking at your work, what do you paint? All landscapes, all white kids, you know. And I told the professor, I know your work too. You don't paint black people, you don't paint any other body but but white people, you know. I said, So let's let's put it like this thing you can discuss with me about my work is purely technique. You don't have nothing to say with my content, right? Well, that's what we did.

SPEAKER_02 44:16

I was and I think that's the difference of people don't discuss technique, they discuss content. That's what the world is doing.

SPEAKER_03 44:24

That's right, that's right. And they're they're they're judging you if you're not doing what they're doing, yeah, yeah, or what their eye wants to see.

SPEAKER_02 44:32

And that's not fair.

SPEAKER_03 44:33

That's not even like set by galleries and museums doing that kind of thing, making people do things like that, you know. But I just never conformed.

SPEAKER_02 44:41

But talk about that. Like, okay, being an artist, how do you get your work into certain galleries?

SPEAKER_03 44:46

Become competent first thing. Become a really competent artist. That's what you know. I used to tell you guys that know as much technique as you can. Once you know that, you're free. You can do anything you want to do then.

SPEAKER_02 44:57

It's not like you're asking to be in this gallery. Your technique speaks for itself.

SPEAKER_03 45:01

See, in a in a studio, you're running situations where a drawing won't work for this one great idea you got. Right. Because you got all these skills, you can switch around and go to two, three, four, five of them, you know, till you get the right technique because it will tell you when you got the right one. So that for me that's that's extremely important.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

Having that toolkit that you can go to.

SPEAKER_03 45:23

This that's how you that's how you you get there. You you you gotta know your feel first. Otherwise, there's there's a some people you see you see them now painting with spatulas and all kinds of stuff. They're putting paint down it. Now, if you think about that, that's a limited painting. Sooner or later. You run out of those that what you can do with that right. But it's a novelty that you can do it with this, or yeah, it just just ends. So now you you you're out there and you have you you don't have any other skills and you're just stuck. So you fade pretty fast, you know.

SPEAKER_02 45:58

No longevity in the in the field.

SPEAKER_03 46:01

So that's why you have to make sure you can say, This guy did not give me a uh a chance because of this, that, or the other. If your work is just bad, then you can say. But if you know your work is good, you know, you you've done your homework, yeah. You can argue with them because you can walk into a gallery and you see this stuff, and they'll reject you. You know, you walk in their gallery later on and you look at what they got in there, and it's crap. You know it's crap. You see, but they just read good work. So does it tell you? It has nothing to do with your work. You know, just not a fit. It's just not a fit. Well, it's you just you're just not copying what's out there. Came down this way. This one guy from the museum, he told me that I would you could have the trouble, the rest of your life trying to get your work out of this. Why is that? He said, Because they can't they can't pigeonhole you, they can't say, Well, this work can be done looked at. You can follow a trail of his work all the way from 10 years, and this artist influence, this artist influence, this artist influence. And he told me that they can't do that, so you're gonna catch the devil.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

And he's been right, he's been right, you know, because like it's almost easier if they can talk about the lineage that you're there, because then there's like more things chat about and curate, like they yeah, like especially when they're giving the speech. Yeah, I would never have thought about that, but that makes total sense.

SPEAKER_02 47:19

But your work, every time I see it, I know it. I'm like, oh yeah, that's Mr. Jeter.

SPEAKER_03 47:23

Like I do have a way of saying what I say, don't I?

SPEAKER_02 47:25

Yeah, loud and clear, Mr. Jeter, loud and clear. Now, what about pricing? Like, how do you price your pieces and I mean each is different sizes?

SPEAKER_03 47:35

Because, you know, when I was teaching, when I first got to Benedict, I was still charging more for that work than I was, you know. And I said, Well, you know, if you can get it, okay, you know, but I think when you start charging thousands of dollars, you know, you need to know uh one thing is fundamental. You need to know that that painting or that drawing will be there for will last a hundred fifteen hundred years if the if the buyer takes care of it. You don't put you don't put a joint on cheap paper. You don't do anything with cheap. You're charging big money for your work. You know, you make sure that you have done what you're supposed to have done in protecting integrity of the work. So that's that that's that's that's number one. Charge you're you're thinking about your work. You have to get into what other other people are thinking about it. Are you getting shows? And where are you getting shows? If you're still showing in libraries, things like that, small local galleries, you know, it is, you know, then it's hard to say, well, I want $5,000 for this work. You know, it's hard to say that because there's nobody validating you. Right. You start to start to charge in $20,000, $40,050,000 and upward. You're talking about museum shows. The real thing is somebody wants a bad guy's what you want for it. Right. But it's just a guideline that you you should think about before you do that, you know. And there's a whole school that thinks that you sell it cheap to get it out there so everybody got your work and that makes you well known. Not necessarily true. It just means just gave away your best work. And if you ever come anybody in the arts, more than likely people that bought it, it's never gonna do anything with it. They they might have collected those pieces there, but it's gonna hang on a back wall back there someplace. They're never gonna ask to be asked to show it another show. So they don't have the the chops to build up your reputation. So you just got gave the work away. But and I that's one reason why I work. I never want to give my work away. Right I believe that sooner or later, even now, I don't sell like other artists, you know, from it, you know. There's probably at least 2,000 artists in the city that sells way more work and probably higher than me, you know. But still, I believe in my work. And I tell my daughter say, Yeah, may not make it now, but you get it later. And they know how to deal with my work. They'll never give it away, especially one in New York. She will never give the work away. You know, so that'll be fine. I have to mention her book. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:57

Talk about it.

SPEAKER_03 49:58

Yeah, well, well, she's well, you'll be here. When she comes on the 5th of August, she's gonna speak here. I'm convinced that she should pay me back. But uh, she's uh when she was a kid, she used to come in the studio with me and draw. Oh boy, I I was so happy for me to be able to work with my daughter. I was I was like LeBron. I played play on the same team with my son. Unfortunately, that's that might be in jeopardy now. But I was thinking like that, you know, we can do shows together, all kinds of stuff. So hey, what was this guy? Pat the writer, Pat Connolly is a Conroy. Famous writer, Conroy. He came to that school and how they teach us how they make them all write something and give it to him, and the guy never reads it. He goes away and you never hear back from him. He called her, put her on the phone, talked to her about 10-15 minutes, told her, you know, I just got to reading what you wrote. And she she I don't she was just spellbound because they knew he was somebody big. Right. So I've read it and I think you should continue to write, you know. So when they got off the phone, she came in and told me she said, I don't think I'm gonna do right anymore. It hurt, really hurt. You know, I said, Why? She said, Well, I just I just don't want to do that. I said, Come on, you can tell me why. She said, Well, I want to write. You want to write what? She said, Poetry. And my head did this because I know poetry, you get about $30, $40 a poem if you get it published. So she said, she said, I want to write poetry. I said, why? She said, Well, you don't make any money with your work, you know. And then a private school, pamper private school for them because we couldn't get them to a good school in our in our neighborhood, you know. So she tells me that, and I said, Okay, okay, okay. See, we had we had made an agreement with them. As long as they did well, no matter what they want to do, we would support them. School they want to go to, we would support them, okay? And so I was stuck with that, you know. So she started writing. She was right. She was definitely right, you know. When she came out of out of college, she worked at a job, but the then she got this job as an editor with Amazon. Wow.

SPEAKER_04 52:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 52:03

Oh, she was good. And they they came after her, you know. She's she can really write. Paid her more than I could prices with what I was making, probably, you know. And stock and all that stuff, you know. She worked there about two years and then just quit. I said, Why would you quit? She said, Well, we were trying to, she was trying to do this this book on Black Lives Matters. And they agreed to do it. They they settled with all these white editors in the office. So they wouldn't let her choose. Like she had Jabbar lined up to write the forward for the book.

unknown 52:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 52:40

They they wouldn't let her do it, you know. So she told them, she said, Well, I'll be I'll be leaving. Same thing, University of Akron, you know. So I understood it, you know. And so she left. She has this knack for getting jobs. She left that. And she worked uh a couple of jobs there. She freelanced for a bit, then she got this job off from it. I think it's the it's the biggest, uh, one of the biggest uh agencies in uh in New York. And uh she met the guy she said about five years before, and that he had been trying to get her to come for the longest. So he he offered her a job again, and and uh they handle artists, you know, writers. He told us you don't have to start at the bottom, you can start up here with me. I'll give you some of my clients, you know. He bought up all the all the contracts, I mean the stock to mine for, you know. That's where she works now. Oh wow, good. Yeah, so there she had been working on that thing for her first book was Un-American.

SPEAKER_04 53:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:32

Um, this one here is uh The Black Period. And it's you know, you shouldn't read it. You shouldn't read it. She talks about her family a lot, you know. I'm sorry, brother, because you know enough about me already. But she does, she talked about the family a lot, you know, the lessons she learned from all that stuff, you know. Uh yeah, it's it's a good book. It's it's won two awards so far. Oh and then I think it was Last of Hurry was up for another one.

unknown 53:55

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:55

Her autograph. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_03 53:57

She'd be on the fifth. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 53:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 53:59

Not have work in it. So I think I don't know how she got in to put uh 60 pieces of art in that. I don't know how she did it. She did. I think they went really wanted a book. When that happens, you can pretty much get anybody doing what you want to do. Do what you want. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:13

You gotta include this. Yeah, but that's real good.

SPEAKER_03 54:16

It's real good.

SPEAKER_02 54:17

So being a full-time artist, how do you handle uh work-life balance? How do you balance, you know, your your health, but also still putting all that you can into your each other?

SPEAKER_03 54:29

Well, you know I'm retired, right? No, I've had a I've had a bunch of health issues, you know, a whole bunch of them, you know, but it's something about those health issues that I always get a warning. Always, you know. I've had the heart thing, you know. My wife had died a month before, and uh kids at Jamila was the oldest one, was in school in England, okay, at the University of Leeds, had to make her go back, and I think the one was at Clemson. So I'm laying in bed one morning, somebody inside of my chest scratching from inside. Yeah it was weird. So I called a doctor, went out there, and I was lucky he had an appointment open the same day. I went out there and he looked and looked and looked, couldn't find anything. So I'm leaving in the car, give me a drive away. He cut he comes out and stops me. He asked me if I ever had that stress test. I told him no. He said, let's just do that just for the heck of it. He calls the clinic, asked him for an appointment, and they told me first of all, it'd be at least three weeks, you know, before we can get an appointment, you know. So he said, okay, so he made that appointment, and then just before he left, the lady called back and said, We just had a cancellation.

unknown 55:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 55:36

So I mean, this was just incredible, you know. So I went the next day on the stress test. That the doctor asked me to, after I took the test, they looked at the results. So at this time, I'm really messed up in here because I just lost my wife, you know, about 20-something years, you know. And so I'm sitting at there waiting, I'm not there about 20 minutes, nobody says anything. So I stopped a nurse and I said, I told her, I said, look, this doctor had me sitting there for 25 minutes now, and I want to go home. Could you please tell me I'm sitting out here? Otherwise, I'm just gonna walk out. I'm mad now, you know. So she goes back about me. And the doctor tells me to come back back there, and I met this guy a long time ago. My wife knew his wife, you know. I met him a long time ago, so we were talking, and he was saying, Well, me and my partner, we looked at the charts, you know, we think everything is okay. So getting ready to leave, and I said, Well, that's good because that's that stress test almost killed me out there, you know. He looked at his partner, he looked back at me, and he tells me, See, if you were my brother, we'd be taking you to the hospital right now. That's what they did. I had to go home and pack a bag, take me to the hospital, and the next morning I was in surgery. I had about 90% blockage. Wow. I got a triple bypass there last summer, not this past one, so that I was in the Gambia and I was coming back. I caught a cold, I thought, you know, God, I was coughing like mad, you know. And if COVID had been that it'd kick me off the plane, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 57:01

Right, right, you know, which would change our sensitivities on such things.

SPEAKER_03 57:06

I took some codeine and that sort of knocked it out a little bit, knocked me out too, you know. But anyway, when I got back, I stayed at my daughter's house for a couple days and she she got concerned to be the hospital. They told me I had walking pneumonia. So they gave me medication. When I got home, they told me to go ahead and see it, see my doctor. So that night when I got home, I started coughing so bad I was coughing of blood. So I got in the car and drove to the emergency. When I got there, you want to hear all this nonsense? Yep. Okay, when I when I got there, it was this little young kid that they kept me there all night from about 12 o'clock on to about 7 o'clock in the morning. Okay. And so this young kid came in around about seven, and he couldn't look at me. He had his head down like that, you know. He kept looking out, looking, he'd look away. So finally I said, just tell me what it is, I can handle it. So, you know, he said, get your affairs in order. Huh? I laughed. You know, I mean, what doctor tells you something like that?

SPEAKER_00 57:59

You can't hear because it sued himself or some kind of stress or something. Well, he was stressed out, not me. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm saying. But he was messing with it. They'll never tell you.

SPEAKER_03 58:08

Yeah, but that's what he told me. So I asked, I made him tell me exactly what you're talking about. He said, We found a spot on your lungs. So, okay. So he told me that uh go see your doctor, he will tell you where to go from there. So I did. And he sent me to a specialist. Looked at my lungs. He came in laughing because I guess he had heard what the doctor said. He came in laughing, and now I'm mad at him because you come in laughing. This is something pretty serious, I thought, you know. So he said, Oh no, no, no, I'm not laughing at you. He was just laughing, but he's told you. I said, You think that's funny? He said, Oh no, it's not funny, but we're not ready to worry about that just yet. And I asked him, What did you mean? He said, Well, there is something on your lungs, sure enough. We don't know what it is. We can't tell. So he said, We're lucky that we even know what noticed something there, because normally you don't find that on the lungs until it's too late. So he sends me to do a uh a CAT scan. Still couldn't tell. Then about a week later, two weeks later, I did a PET scan, still couldn't tell. Then they did what they cut a biopsy, they got it, they took those things, stick it inside your hand, and grab a piece of it. Still couldn't tell. So about a month later, he calls me in and tells me, said, the last CAT scan you took, that meant that you had to do something. You just couldn't. So he put me on the table and sent it down to the lab, cut a piece out, sent it to the lab, it was cancerous. And he told me that he got it all, you know, that the lymph glands were clear, you know, and that they didn't expect anything. I don't I didn't I didn't have to go through no treatment, no other treatment. Every six months I get a CAT scan. And every time I've had a second bypass on it, just in nick of time, you know. But that's what I'm saying. I get a warning, I listen. Me and my subconscious don't wear, yeah. Me and him, uh, we go way back. But that's I mean, that's why I'm sealed here. I actually listen.

SPEAKER_02 59:57

You stay tuned in to yourself. Yeah, you know, that's good.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:01

So what's what's next for you? This the show that we're we're sitting in the middle of.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:06

I have no idea. I I can I can tell you this that uh I'm supposed to be doing something down at the finish center. Oh, really? The culture center there. You know, I'm supposed to be doing something there. I might end up trying to complete that and do some paintings there. The only thing I would take, that one in the middle, the big one. The only thing I would take down there, everything else can be finished in my studio if I have to. You know, and I'll probably paint some, you know. I always really I've been collecting, I'm always collecting some of these crazy mirror frames, fairly old, you know, and to the better. That means it has character to me at least, you know. And I force you to create a composition that you probably wouldn't think about. So I got a bunch of those things at the house. I'm gonna start filling them up with paintings, I think. I don't I don't have a theme that is too early for me to think even think about a theme, you know. Yeah I suspect that it's gonna be a further company continuation of this thing here. I just think that only I think there's two really, really bad things in this world that's happening to us now. One is climate change, the other one is racism. Racism is racist COVID can't hold accountable to racism. It can't it can't even hold accountable. This this this thing is all over the world. In almost every place where there's been a war, where people have been massacred, it's because one dominant group is trying to take advantage. They create create hatred toward one group. All of us like that. There's no no wars that just popped up out of no place. Yeah, Hitler. It's just crazy, you know. So I just keep on going with what I do, you know. And I did it will come when it's ready. I I think it's trying to trend toward this thing of kids with power. You know, I'm working two more. The one I'm working on, I'm gonna call that newborn. That's the name of that one. And then there's one, there's no name for one with the two butterflies.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:51

You know, I'm thinking of OP. She's doing good, she's in Texas, she's one of our my best friends, and and she used to do, she does uh nails, so she's creating, she's still creating, but she used to do butterflies. Every time we were in class of Mr. G there, he would be like, You pick what you want to draw, yeah, and she would draw butterflies. Yeah, she she would. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:10

You knew Amina too, didn't you?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:12

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:12

Amina, but she is just off there. She's out there. You know, she would you would you would see her sometime on Facebook and she's I look like she's singing or something, you know? Is she actually doing music?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:23

You gotta tell them who was your best student. I'm just waiting. I'm not gonna put you on the spot like that. I'm not gonna put you on the spot like that.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:30

I can tell you who I thought had had most potential. Okay. It was you. Really?

unknown 1:02:35

I did.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:36

Why do you think I just spent so much time with you? Trying to get you because I had to get through all that nonsense in your head. Yeah. But I thought you had some good potential. I still remember that one piece with the it was a dock or something, wasn't it? It was big in my head. A painting you did.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:49

I did a painting of pumpkins.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:51

Yeah, there was one also, I think of a little dock or something when it was water, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:56

Oh, yeah. It was a charcoal piece. It was charcoal.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:00

It was a painting, I think. Painting? I thought it was. Well, I mean, you you have to forgive me. You should remember all your work. I remember less and less and less every day. I thought you had great potential. The one that fulfilled himself was Daniel. Linda's doing uh a lot at that too, you know. She still works full-time. You know, that's about she probably. Well, Daniel's probably the hardest worker we've ever had. I think he's nice, the student with the most potential, you know. That's as messed up and hated as the rest of us, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:28

I just tend to be a little bit off at times. And Daniel's he's very emotional, you know, about everything, you know, but can he draw? He went to that school up in New York, the Academy of Figure. He got scholarship there. You know, from Minity College. That's a that's a very difficult place to even get into. And when he graduated, he got uh he got an award to go to Thailand or someplace to study for paint just six weeks ago.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:55

Oh see something anything is possible.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:58

We couldn't, you know, like try to get people to go outside of here, you know, to grad school. It was difficult to get them to leave home. I've never seen a state quite like this where students would not leave home. It's a culture, yeah. And I asked him, I said, Well, I wouldn't ask them that, but what kind of mothers that will encourage you to stay here when you have an opportunity to go out and better yourself, you know? I don't know, but I guess they were like that and they just passed on their kids, you know. That just makes me think of that piece right there. That's about uh a father who never quit, you know. He's still trying to teach this. All this stuff is speculating that the the pandemic holds. And we are really suffering, everybody's really suffering. So if you look at this, you see on the Wall Street New York, that represents the people that God that really is responsible for all of this stuff, you know. Yeah, and all these people dying is because of them. Greed, you know. So that talks about them not living just enough. You know where that's from, don't you? Living just enough enough for the city. Steve Wonder. Oh we're gonna have to educate her. Yeah, because you not you 90.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:08

But they all didn't wrap. It's just 90.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13

Okay, it was time to wrap it up. It's time to wrap it up. Y'all coming from me. It's time to wrap it up.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

Just getting good and just I don't know. Like when you when you eternage, those things matter, and in a certain age, it doesn't. I always think about like you being the same generation as Kevin and I, but 90 is like sister's generation.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:31

I'm mature, and there's a book.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

I'm oh it's told there's a big difference between that and all of a sudden we could steal everything. Yeah, yeah. It's like it's like cause and Napster and whatever else happened, mom. Like all of a sudden, like it didn't matter what was popular right now, right? We were listening to everything.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:50

We heard the music too, you know. Yeah, I mean, some of the things these people look at the OJs. I I bet you haven't heard those really slow tunes they used to sing. You and me. Oh, go and get the survival record. It's survival. You can probably find on online survival by the OJs. You listen, you listen to stuff. Ah, it was it was our our tunes we listened to. It was with our girlfriend, your favorite girl? And they get to swing is that swinging at the singing and stuff? Oh, amazing. OJs, all these people. The old temptations, the first ones. The first ones, okay. The first you don't even know the temptations.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:24

You don't know what temptation is. No, I know what the temptations are, but I didn't know you're talking about the old ones. Well, you watched the movie, right? Yeah, I seen the movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:32

Like, like they still tour now. I think when temptation left.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:35

Otis only went a lot.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:36

No, my friends got mad at me because I didn't know what they were talking about.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:39

That's pretty good. Oh, yeah, nobody ever comes to see you, Otis. Nobody, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

When I said that, I was like, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:46

But this was a good episode. Thank you, Mr. Jeter.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:48

You guys closed down the office, you know that aren't you?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:51

They leave it for it's okay. We enjoyed this episode. This is gonna go down in the books. And I definitely cannot wait to see the full exhibit. What's the date? Well, the last day they'll be here the 20th. September or August 20th. Okay, August 20th.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:09

I know they were talking about doing something, but since uh they're doing this thing with my daughter, they were talking about a closing of some sort. We had an opening for it, but this was this was not meant to be an exhibition in the in the typical, you know, traditional sense. This was meant to be in an artist's studio. That's why you see the place is changing. So I look like my studio now. Yeah, so um, that's what it was meant to be. So it was it was designed to encourage people to come in to talk. Okay. Unfortunately, uh we're getting people in. This they say it's more than they ever got in the in this gallery, you know, but we're not getting black artists, they're not coming. I I don't know why that is. I I think that there's something about the artist. Well, a lot of young white artists are not coming either. Most of the older artists is coming, you know, but it's something about I don't know if this is true or not, but it seems true that young artists don't feel like they need anything they got that went before them. You can find that in music also, you know, that you ask one, you know, who John Coltrane is. Yeah, you know, and these guys you can't you can't do music without knowing who Coltrane is, not the saxophone, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:14

Research, they don't need any of that history behind any of it.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:17

And so they would treat me like an old head that whose time is past, you know. And I think I'm very contemporary. Yeah, you need a gallery, you need a gallery. There's only a few people can actually make it that way, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:31

You know, insta money ain't real money.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:34

Yeah, but yeah, but the thing was with me is that I go see anybody's work, just see the art. I don't have to know the person. Yeah, absolutely. See if they actually know what they're talking about. You know, you hear about the work, and you know, it's this will probably be the last time we'd be able to see my work because uh that's why I had to get this interview. I said, uh-uh, Mr. Jesus. Because I don't plan to do any more shows here. It's just I don't I don't think it's really worth my time anymore, you know. You mean in the state? Yeah, well, I mean in Columbia. Oh if they won't come here, they certainly not gonna leave Columbia to see me work, you know. You won't come here. We're gonna wrap it up.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:09

Yeah, we're gonna wrap it up and make sure you guys check out Mr. Jeter's work. Can they find you on social media, our website? Tyron Jeter.com.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:18

Yeah, that's my website, TyronJeter.com.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:21

And we just want to say thank you to 701 Whaley for definitely letting us use this place to do this episode just to wrap things up. Thank you again, Mr. Jeter. It's been a pleasure. And make sure you guys follow us and like all of our stuff on social media and make sure you subscribe. Good one.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:39

Glad that's done.