Kojo Kamau: "Artistic Impressions With Historical Significance Documenting Home And Far Away Places"

Kojo Kamau, Elijah Pierce. Courtesy of the artist.

Kojo Kamau was my subject once before, when I was writing artist profiles for Columbus Monthly magazine, and he was the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Ohioana Career Award for "outstanding professional accomplishment in arts and humanities." In receiving the prize, he joined a group that includes Suzanne Farrell, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Aminah Robinson, Toni Morrison, Lillian Gish, and Burgess Meredith. Kojo, as he is known at home, studied photography at Columbus College of Art and Design, which prepared him for his professional career in the Air Force and, later, as chief medical photographer at the Ohio State University Hospital. He created and occupied the position of staff photographer for the Columbus Symphony.

But this month, in a career retrospective at the Shot Tower Gallery at Fort Hayes in Columbus, Kojo tells his own story visually in a way fuller, more elegant, and with more dignity than it's likely any writer can. Through the range and quality of his vision one gains not only memorable images, but a memorable look at a human being whose art gives the just measure of his character.

Kojo Kamau, Aminah Robinson. Courtesy of the artist.

Kojo was born into the Jones family and received the name of Bob Jr. He chose an African name in 1970: "Kojo" for "unconquerable," "Kamau" for "quiet one," thereby demonstrating what one sees in his work: confidence and self-knowledge. While he is a commercial photographer of great enterprise who supports himself by his work, among Columbus's artists, he is the legatee of Elijah Pierce. He seamlessly assumed the role of generous teacher, mentor, advocate, and organizer, particularly for a generation of African-American artists. Kojo founded the community-based Action for Community Expression (ACE), which encouraged African-American participation in the arts, a profoundly effective and influential group. Still, many credit him personally with helping them find arts careers they would otherwise never have dreamed. Kojo and Aminah Robinson both knew and learned from Pierce; both have in turn inspired the next generation of Columbus artists with respect like they received from the generation before them (see Starr Review, "Aminah Robinson's Oral History for the Hard of Hearing," May 2012.)

Kojo Kamau, Rusty Bryant. Courtesy of the artist.

Over his career, Kojo has documented hundreds of artists in all genres. He's memorialized Columbus's very rich legacy of mid- and late-twentieth century artists and performers (these include keyboardists Hank Marr, Bobby Floyd, and Aaron Diehl; and outsider artist William Hawkins) as well as anyone who came or comes to town (Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Abbey Lincoln, Muhammed Ali, Spike Lee).

Kojo's portraits of artists certainly document a large part of his own heart— his own conviction that the arts are central and vital to everyday human experience; that economic and social status shouldn't affect access to participation in arts, either as creator or audience. 

Kojo's images never show artists as alien, or above the viewer, however they are costumed or wherever they stand. He conveys a familiar essence, enhanced by his own way of polishing the individual's particular personality. You realize that these people are special, but they are not glamorous as much as they command our respect for their vision and accomplishment. We recognize that they are cut from the same, human cloth that we are. That's why we admire them so much: It's seeing our similarities with them that makes their art so wonderful and valuable.

Kojo Kamau, Smoky Brown (outsider artist). Courtesy of the artist.

Kojo Kamau, Stormy Sunday (BW). Courtesy of the artist.

Portraits of Columbus artists form one aspect of Kojo's greater, comprehensive portrait of the city, and his self-portrait as a native and citizen of this place. Ever since his student days, city scenes have articulated his pride, pleasure, and hopes for this community. (see Starr Review, "Location, Location, Location! Cityscapes of Harvey Gilliam and Kojo Kamau," February 2012.) Many of his photographs of downtown take advantage of the classic urban elements of skyscrapers against a brilliant horizon, handsome spans across a broad, curving  river that mirrors and extends the height of the buildings on its banks: Columbus, seen from the west, provides those classic elements of urban beauty that should, I imagine, make the heart of any native photographer glow. He has often created distinctive works of elegance from Scioto River views.

Kojo Kamau, Progress 2: Fort Hayes Hotel, 1977.
Courtesy of the artist.

But Kojo has not only documented urban pin-ups with contrasting hard edges—like the Afro-American neighborhood dispossessed by the construction of freeway that guillotined it from Downtown—but he has also invoked through a series of wonderfully succinct images, the Progress series, the ironies of social and political forces competing to shape and define an ever-better city. These may be the images that most truly illustrate the photographer's intimacy with the city not simply as a subject, but as self. Striking as the contrast (visual and emotional) of Progress 2 may be, the close detail of the rubble, falling out from the old hotel virtually into our laps, is striking and poignant. 

The viewer cannot tell from the picture alone what the Fort Hayes Hotel looked like—whether it was a monstrosity whose time had long since come, or whether it was a landmark it was criminal to destroy. The detail itself is what matters, especially compared to the sleek, simple lines of the modern tower beyond. The accumulation of information from the old building speaks to experience, time, and history themselves, even without any evaluative overlay of aesthetics or sentiment. The Fort Hays Hotel endured. It was always there; a fact of the city. As such, it was part of the life of Kojo and all others who spent their lives in Columbus. The destruction of a familiar, old building goes beyond civic, temporal value into its value as embodied memory for those who have moved through and around it ; those who know the city's geography by its presence, and who will be made strangers by its absence.

Such images of upheaval in his Progress series, all of which portray the destruction of something in the manmade landscape, are among the most poignant in Kojo's work, which abounds in images of people of all levels of social standing all around the world, particularly the African diaspora. Wherever he shoots people, he shoots from the heart, and his camera, like his eye, finds only dignity in emotion common to people everywhere, in every culture.

Kojo Kamau, Moton Field. Courtesy of the artist.

Sorrow, despair, regret—nostalgia, even—never have human faces in his work. He has photographed the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where Martin Luther King was murdered, with no one in the frame—only the rooms, his balcony, and a commemorative marker. His image of Moton Field at Tuskegee Institute is similarly taciturn. He withholds pride and the intrinsic sorrows of war and segregation for his viewers to experience. His faith is in the symbols, and in the viewer's ability to identify and absorb them; then to experience the emotion the more powerfully for owning it. Note, however, that here he combines black and white with minimal color. It is a very calm, understated photograph, but the airplane's markings are in color; the plane steps up to deliver the soliloquy on a low-lit stage.

Kojo Kamau, Heads High. Group of photos from Ivory Coast, Brazil, etc. Courtesy of the artist.

Kojo's respect for every person he photographs is radiantly clear. He has traveled very extensively (not only in Africa and the Diaspora; the current show includes haunting photographs from travels in Switzerland, for example) . In Africa, he has photographed people in scenes that would be difficult for Westerners to obtain. But anyone who spends a few minutes in conversation with Kojo quickly learns how he gets the pictures he does: He is calm and quiet, gracious and smiling and has nothing at all pushy about him. So while it is the custom in West Africa that one not photograph strangers, he nevertheless has beautiful images of people at daily tasks. He reminds me that groups are easier to capture than individuals, but we agree that it requires a selfless invisibility to take such pictures. 

Kojo Kamau, Marketplace. Group of photos from Ivory Coast, Senegal, etc. Courtesy of the artist.

In Kojo's case, he does not have to take on this invisible quality; nor does he acquire it as a matter of his skin color, for the differences between African-Americans and Africans are obvious to both. It is simply a matter, if you will, of inherently fine human manners. The imagination that makes the artist and puts him in the subject's shoes is the same that makes the man and puts him in another man's shoes. Thus, in his pictures from non-industrialized countries, where Westerners are prone to think of people first through concerns about standards of living, wealth and poverty, health and disease, Kojo means to capture—and does capture—people obsessed with none of the above, but with the normal duties, dreams, and emotions of their real, daily lives.

Kojo Kamau, Run Jesse. Courtesy of the artist.

Through this lens Kojo has long documented American political figures and political campaigns. He has an impressive collection of Presidents both as candidates and as elected heads of state taken as they've come through Columbus, and also at party conventions. In this show, pictures of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson are particularly striking. 

Kojo's images of politicians are positive: He figures them as the hope of the people in a democracy; as those who should, will, and do represent the citizenry. This category of picture may have ironies in it—a drunk sprawled on the steps of Madison Square Garden while Democratic convention-goers walk, unseeing, over and around him—but he does not portray a black-hearted political system. He portrays politicians and/or citizens with heart. He shows presidential candidates surrounded by voters, by enthusiasm, by a sense of people excited by and committed to government by responsible leaders. His photographs of African-American political figures especially are of strong, polished people, always elevated and always smiling: Ready and able.

Kojo Kamau, On the Road #65 (Michelle Obama). Courtesy of the artist.

Kojo's retrospective closes on November 2. It offers many images beautiful, exciting, wry, or uplifting, any one of which is worth a visit on its own merits. But I love the portrait of the artist and his vision of the world that emerge from the show. He shows us a place where people are indeed endowed with equal rights by virtue of common needs, activities, and desires.

It's a world with important roles for leaders. He believes that people with singular gifts can inspire us; that we bear with these people special relationships of respect on the one side and responsibility on the other. Kojo's political portraits emphasize the intensity of the connection between people and their leaders. His portraits of artists, pictured in their singularity, show the strains of work and thought on their faces, the weight of the responsibility they bear for their humane efforts.

Kojo Kamau, On the Road #62. Courtesy of the artist.

While Kojo documents a wide selection of subjects and experiences, his body of work adds up to one man very clearly defined, not only by his talent and his eye, but by his caring, hopeful, and pragmatic intuitions about a decent world.

Location, Location, Location! Cityscapes of Harvey Gilliam and Kojo Kamau

The 2012 bicentennial of Columbus, Ohio is inspiring a panoply of art shows. Cityscapes Yesteryear, currently open at the King Arts Complex and co-sponsored by Art for Community Expression, is a particularly sweet example. It features the work of photographer Kojo Kamau (website), most from his student days when he was getting to know his camera and 35mm film. "Buildings don't move," he laughs, so he practiced on the city—which has in fact moved considerably since his 1960 explorations.

Tall One, 24 x 20," 1960. Kojo Kamau. 

At the same time, his friend Harvey Gilliam was exploring his favorite places in watercolors. Having worked in oils, he had fallen in love with a medium that was ascending—like photography—to claim its own status among the primary visual arts.

Columbus Skyline, ca. 28 x 21," 1970. Harvey Gilliam.

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Cityscapes Yesteryear gives the visitor windows onto the city disappeared, altered, and constant. These three views of a classic Columbus vista, of the Scioto River edge of downtown, with the landmark LeVeque Tower and various State office buildings celebrate architectural beauty, prosperity, and, taken together, continuity. Kamau and Gilliam have agreed with many others that this is the definitive view of their city, even with its changes across the years.

Urban Landscape #115, 24 x 20, 2006. Kojo Kamau.

I went into this show asking myself, "If I were not from Columbus, would I be interested in these works? Is their particular location their major appeal? Is work like this only for people who recognize the scenes?"

A point of reference for this question is a painting in the show from Kamau's collection, a Columbus scene by Roman Johnson, a Columbus native of national reputation. The work is Oak Street, from 1980. While outside information tells us that it's Columbus, the scene could be in just about any city. The interest of the work is not its specific location, but the artist's excellence in execution of materials and success in suggesting a story. It's a defined urban landscape for us to imagine our ways into.

I found that some of the work in this show operates at this level too, Gilliam's Central Market (20 x 27," ca. 1960), for instance. A resident of our city will recognize the landmarks in the background and know that the market is a thing of the past. For others, it's a charming scene from a collective past—from a European country, even—that it's easy to enter and enjoy visiting. As for being urban? Urban is defined in a must softer way than we know it today, wherever this city is located.

Kamau's Strolling on the Avenue (1997) is similarly an open image, a scene that could be from any tough neighborhood in an American city. The composition is powerful in line, color, and mass, and the viewer can find any number of stories—of hope, despair, damage or confidence—waiting to be told here. Made in Columbus, universally accessible.

But much of Cityscapes Yesteryear indulges the lover of Columbus by encouraging personal stories of exactly the kind I enjoyed when I met Gilliam and Kamau at the gallery. Gilliam remembers Helen Carter's Music School  fondly as the place his wife took music lessons. The house is not there any more, but he can locate its former site for me by tracing certain East Side intersections  no longer known for their leafy settings. 


Neither Gilliam nor Kamau ever considered his work to be anything for the historical record. Gilliam painted for enjoyment, selecting his scenes for personal reasons: He liked the look of the buildings, or had ties to them; one subject was the school where he waited in the car during his daughter's weekly lesson. Below, Unity Neighborhood Scene (16.5 x 35"), pictures his own neighborhood at 5th Street and 9th Avenue during the '70s, recollecting who lived where and the community they had. "There's a story behind every painting," he asserts. Clearly those stories lead him to his subjects.

Gilliam enjoyed having people look over his shoulder as he worked. He was happy to turn their interest to profit. A goodly portion of his work was done on commission from friends, or from others who met him while he painted, then asked if he would do paintings of their homes. He learned from another artist the value of putting together a portfolio to display at the annual home show, from which he also drew clients. Often, though, Gilliam made two paintings of a commissioned subject, keeping one for himself out of personal interest.

Gilliam is 91 years old now and Cityscapes Yesteryear is his first substantial show, the brainchild of Kamau, who saw the unique opportunity that Bicentennial Columbus and Black History Month offered. Gilliam, while prolific—his house is said to be overflowing with work—has not undertaken the artistic business of professional documentation or competing to be in art shows. Nevertheless, he sets very high standards for his work, a sort often overlooked by the local watercolor society painter. He is adamant about editing as he composes, careful to put in details that count but to eliminate such "reality" as detracts from the best composition. "I'm not concerned with documentation, with what's visible," he insists. I want to convince the viewer that it's here and now."

The Columbus that Gilliam represented forty or fifty years ago is in fact very similar to the city of today. In his paintings of neighborhoods of detached houses with lawns, and of churches, he depicts a city that builds out instead of up, whose neighborhoods are filled with houses and trees rather than with high-density construction, and where the density of houses of worship is very high. 

 Tim Treadwell House (left), Mt. Vernon Avenue AME (middle), and Church of the Living God (bottom), are examples of scenes from the pastoral city. The architecture may be faux-Tudor, institutional Deco, or a renovated cottage in a historic neighborhood, 

 but it's a calm, comfortable, and neighborly city, not a harsh, dirty, or worn place.


When Gilliam explains his other pictures, he locates the buildings directionally—for example, on the northwest corner of the intersection, or on the south side of the street—and nearly always names the unseen homes or businesses in front of which he worked.

His cityscapes give us located scenes, the very places he and others have occupied and loved over years of living in Columbus, Ohio. They can be found by map or compass. They are places filled with stories for generations of residents, their friends, and passersby. But they are also tiles in a mosaic that creates the character and the mythology of the city: The safe, easy-going community that is almost not a city at all. In fact, I like most of all Down My Alley (ca.1970), still a typical Columbus scene, as it remains a scene typical in small-town Ohio. 

Kojo Kamau's Columbus tends to be as particular as Gilliam's, but over his career he has taken his camera downtown. Gilliam paints the personal scene, the world in which individuals dominate. Even though he rarely paints people into his picture, it's easy to put ourselves into the personal, warm spaces. Kamau's photos are of the busy city, where a person can  get lost in the crowd or enjoy a faster pace.

Spicer's Furniture (24 x 20," 1960), above, is the emblem of "photographic detail," delivering every telephone and light pole, wire, parking meter, and every letter on every sign—all that Gilliam would edit out for the sake of a preferred narrative reality. Would one recognize this as an avenue in Columbus in particular? The people who have been there surely will. The abundant, distinct detail suggests that the stories may be different from those that attach to the houses with lawns.

Center of Town from 1960 is another photo that will undoubtedly fill Columbus natives with nostalgia or excitement, chock full as it is with the buildings that remain, have been replaced or altered. The huge signs that name businesses often become landmarks in themselves even when their namesakes have disappeared; Gam (Gambrinus Beer) and Roy's Watches are undoubtedly redolent of place and period, with thousands of personal memories attached. It's a picture that could be of another city, but lacking any outstanding landmark, it's a scene that draws its life from what viewers bring and add to it: their own sense of place derived from visual memory.


 It's interesting that Kamau used these signs in a photomontage, Night Lights, that well illustrates the difference between local cityscape and work about The City, generalized as a hard, fast, exciting place. Center of Town, above is clearly Our Town. Who would delve into the details of this photograph of a wide, unbustling city street lined by common enough architecture? Of course plenty of people would, and they are from Columbus, fascinated by the image's opportunity to attach their personal memories, city history, stories they've heard, and impressions to validate or disprove. Night Lights isn't history, but fantasy—television or movies, or global cities built up and not spread across seemingly endless acreage. 


But a dream city is our city as much as the green-grass genteel city and the crowded Afro-American neighborhoods and the remembered markets long gone. It's clear that there are many images in this show that would probably not mean much to a person from Burbank or Boston. Sometimes the formal aspects of a work aren't enough to make the subject matter broadly interesting. But everything here—including the work with universal appeal—was made with an eye focused exclusively on home. It reflects the complexity of the idea of a city, but even more, how a city, constructed and landscaped, is ultimately the cloudy locus for millions of individual moments, memories, and stories.

Kojo Kamau and Harvey Gilliam, 2012

With thanks to Julie Fultz for her assistance with the images of Harvey Gilliam's work.

Elijah Pierce, Sanctuary in the 1960s

Columbus, Ohio lays claim to its share of famous artists: George Bellows was born and raised here, as was James Thurber. Roy Lichtenstein studied and taught at Ohio State during the '40s. Currently living and working among us are the pioneer of computer art, Charles Csuri; photographer Tony Mendoza; Ann Hamilton, and Aminah Robinson. 

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Christ with Rose of Sharon, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving,17 1/2 x 17 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Robinson is a direct heir—personal and artistic—of the artist I believe closest to our city's civic identity, woodcarver Elijah Pierce. Pierce, a barber by trade, came to Columbus in 1916 when he was 24. He died here in 1984, at age 92. The son of a former slave, he grew up in rural Mississippi where he studied through the eighth grade and learned to carve with a pocketknife.

In Columbus, Pierce was famous not only as a carver, but also as the spiritual center of a community. He was the man without whom a large and prolific generation of the city's Black artists might have missed their calling. Art, religious devotion, and rock-solid principles for righteous living were strongly allied in him, as both his oeuvre and the living memory of him attest.

During his lifetime, Pierce became famous beyond Columbus. In 1973, he won first prize in the  International Exhibition of Primitive Art in Yugoslavia. In 1975, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, as a master traditional artist.

Among the many to whom Pierce was a mentor and inspiration is Kojo Kamau, Columbus's eminent photographer. Some of Kamau's photos of Pierce and his shop can be found online here. Although the photos show what we know to be an urban workshop in the late 20th century, Pierce himself looks like a man from an earlier place and era. His famously stick-like figure—his expression adding to the sense of a cigar-store Indian in the view of him at his table, formally dressed in his unimproved setting—certainly reinforces the stories about the man himself: unpretentious, plain, a believer with his eyes on the right course. Nothing about him suggests that he felt any need to appear sophisticated or urbane.

Amish, Holmes Co., Ohio Variable Star Crib Quilt, c. 1890's Pieced cotton chambray, 41 x 33 1/2 inches Private collection Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

The Keny Galleries in Columbus are currently showing Two Visions of Spirituality: Elijah Pierce's Woodcarvings and Historical Amish Quilts, a beautiful show. Pierce's carvings make a natural visual pairing with the quilts. Together they evoke the warmth of personal, direct expression from a rural past. Ohio is home to substantial and still growing Amish communities that preserve traditional ways, down to continuing use of horse and buggy transportation and eschewal of electrification. Even though the patterns and sewing methods of the quilts displayed can be found today, the antique quilts in this show  (ranging from the 1890s through 1937) do indeed have the softness that age imparts textiles. Time has enriched their inherent beauty.

Amish, Holmes Co., Ohio Probably made by Naomi Hershberger (wife of Daniel, married 1907) Nine Patch/Diamond in the Square Variation Quilt, c. 1915-25 Pieced cotton and cotton sateen, 78 x 76 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

It finally struck me, though, as I surveyed Pierce's boldly colored, folkloric carvings of Jesus, angels, and biblical stories, that most of his work in this show—hanging so comfortably among the antique quilts—actually dates from the 1960s and '70s. His carvings, so simple in appearance and convinced in moral vision, are the work of an urban Black man—one who remained a starched community elder, sitting downtown in his rocker, plying folk art during the civil rights era of fiery social and racial unrest.

Burning buildings during Watts riots, August 1965. New York World-Telegram photo.

In 1965, when many of the pieces at Keny are dated, I was a high school student in small-town Ohio, unable to escape the network news my parents watched every evening. In memory, it's all scenes of shattered windows and fires at night in cities wracked by race riots. The people of my homogenous town had strongly worded and freely expressed opinions about Negroes in general. My skin was always crawling with generalized foreboding. Heroes and hopes were assassinated as if we were supposed to get used to it. The world felt to me wholly public and political, a world of causes, not individuals. For an introspective, cloistered girl it was an appalling time. While I was engaged by the cause of civil rights, I was overpowered by the intensity of the public world. I lacked knowing that it could be legitimate to insist on growing up as a clear-headed individual with some solid ideas about her place in the world.

My memories of the intense anxiety of the '60s make the Keny selection of Pierce's work feel almost shockingly immediate and new. These carvings, so focused on the spiritual life, picture havens of the personal in a world that we know was overtaken by virtual public warfare and urgent social movements. Art has to come from a strong, concentrated self—even art that responds directly to the affairs of the world or proposes changes in them. 

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Angel (with Ruby Brown's Family), 1966 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 27 3/4 x 17 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Pierce was hardly oblivious to society: His work covered civil rights themes and heroes. The work in the Keny show is only a tiny selection of his spiritual oeuvre. But even here we see in one of his many portrayals of angels, an Angel (with Ruby Brown's Family) from 1966, his concern with issues of race. Ruby Brown is the title subject of a poem by Langston Hughes:

She was young and beautiful
And golden like the sunshine
That warmed her body.
And because she was colored
Mayville had no place to offer her,
Nor fuel for the clean flame of joy
That tried to burn within her soul.

In Hughes' poem, Ruby, the scullery maid, is corrupted into prostitution by men who take advantage of her entirely normal wishes for a life with a little money and incident. "The good church folk do not mention/ Her name any more." But Pierce depicts an angel before a cross with the sacred heart, and a rose of Sharon, protecting Ruby's family from any taunts by churchgoing neighbors. Not only are they protected, they are totally removed from others.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Angel with Mother and Child in the Garden, 1966 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 25 3/4 x 15 1/2 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

In Angel with Mother and Child, too, a mother and her son appear to stand in a garden with an angel watching over them. Part of their blessed status seems to be their self-contained separation from anyone else.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 The Good Samaritan, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 13 x 22 inches Private collection Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

Even in The Good Samaritan, the most complex and detailed composition here, the special, protective relationship is celebrated. The priest and the Levite—dominant in their size, posture, and colors—pass the robbers' victim, but the Samaritan—small and brown—bows over to assist him. Their relationship appears, like the angelic ones we've seen, to be placed in a garden, away from the open space the others traverse.

Elijah Pierce, 1892-1984 Sermon on the Mount, 1965 Painted bas relief woodcarving, 15 3/4 x 15 inches Image courtesy of the Keny Galleries

The most interesting removal of all, I think, is the portrayal of Jesus in Sermon on the Mount. He sits with his hands folded on his knees, alone on a hill under a sky with three-dimensional clouds. The yellow orb has beams that signify sun, although the darkness of the upper sky gives the feeling of night rolling in, with either the sun setting or the moon rising.

For a depiction of the Sermon on the Mount this is unusual, for there is no congregation even suggested, only Jesus with his upward-looking, far-away gaze. He's not preaching: He's thinking, or introspecting. Under a dramatic sky, with flowers growing at his feet, Jesus looks so contented! This is a moment of quiet happiness that the human writing this entirely relates to. It's a contentment that seems achievable, even without a halo.

While my observations about the carvings in Keny's beautiful show may add nothing to the knowledge of Pierce's work, my point in writing is about my own satisfaction to discover in this folk artist a fellow traveler through an era so disconcerting and painful to me, one in which I felt so keen a need for a quiet shelter. I wish I had discovered him then. 

I've never had religious convictions; Jesus is a metaphor for me. But the habit of cultivating strength from the inside out, through wise solitude, is one I've learned to value highly. It's a form of spirituality characteristic not only of religion, but of artistic visions as well. While the 1960s flamed, Pierce maintained his religious faith and expressed it through art-making too. Whatever his legacy in the church, his legacy among practicing artists is deep. To inspire seekers of freedom for the inner life amidst a clamorous world of mass concerns strikes me as a great legacy.