#bernardcollinsjr

[mightyhip]

Illadel Allstar Reunion

A gathering of some of Philadelphia's finest talent at Vernon Park in Germantown.

Biggup to Mecca Bey, Ryva, and Yahne for the organization and planning. 

Shout out to C Knowledge the Doodlebug and the Cosmic Funk Orchestra

NAME, BernardCollinsJR,,Ursula Rucker, Basil Scrivens, Poetica, Oscar Castro, Jahiti, Motorcycle Jesus, DJ Ghetto and many more.

[mightyhip]

Visual Artist "Bernard Collins" discussing the Battle of Ideas

Q&A with CanePiece

Photography: Fer de Lance

Nestled in the suburban comfort of New Jersey is one of Philadelphia's most talented children. This painter is the epitome of cool.  He exudes a calmness and then quickly can transform into a singing, poetry reciting, quotation machine. His artwork, at this time, places the black female elegantly, often futuristic and always with vision.

MH: I am in the home of Bernard Collins Jr. a respected visual artist, a skilled performer and martial artist. Wait didn't you do capoeira for a while also?

B: Taekwondo for a long time. I did capoeira, I liked it but I haven't been in to it as much as I'd like to. I tell you one thing health has been tantamount. Transitioning from urban single to suburban married I kept putting on weight. I like to cook, no corner stores, I'm having good healthy food, I started gaining weight.  I went to the doctor thinking I weighed 250 pounds, which was heavy for me,  I got on the scale and weighed 315 pounds.

MH: You got up to 315!

B: Talking to the nurse I was like your scale is broken. She was like, "You broke it with your big behind."

MH: [LAUGHING]

B: She was like it's a little too heavy. And I could feel it. Feet, trouble with my back strange stuff.  So I got my kettlebells and got my life in order.  I've integrated exercise into my life, into parenting, into creating art. I've been doing that to find that harmony and balance between it.

MH: Totally, you have children to live for.

B: People are falling off.  I had a brother-in-law pass and he was forty... [SEARCHES HIS MIND FOR THE YEAR]

MH: Once you are saying in his forties that is too young.

B: High blood pressure, things like that. Preventable things.  I had to realize I am not indestructible. Currently I am 250.

MH: You don't even look 250.

B: The muscle mass weighs more. 

MH: Describe yourself in your own terms.

B: Eclectic eccentric. Considerate and assertive.  Ambitious without being a jerk. [LAUGHS]

MH: Whenever you were mentioned to me or I mentioned you to others that know you, they smile.

B: Cool! That's good. That is an accomplishment.

MH: That is indeed a worthy accomplishment in somebody's life.

B: It's a goal. [LAUGHS] We have been in a circle of people who have skyrocketed to fame, and they've achieved so much, and it is warranted and was earned, but a lot of times they stepped on people's feet along the way.

MH: Yes I know.

B: But you know there was a Dolamite poem...

MH: [LAUGHING] 

B: ...he hustled during his comedy shows to finance his movies. He was his own backer, there was something to that whole Rudy Ray Moore character.  But the idea was, he had a poem where he talked about hog maws and chitterlings  and hanging out in places he used to hang and all that because, "The same people you see on the way down are the same people you see on the way up."

MH: Inciteful.

B: I internalized that, if I am good to people, whether on top or on the bottom then at least I am an honorable person. People make a connection, and most of the good things that happen, you know education, finance, work, commissions, repeat customers come from people liking what you do and you. They support you and you can do it more. The art world is all about patronage, it's all about support and having that communication with people that says, this is what I'm thinking, this is how I am presenting it, do you agree or feel strongly enough to embrace it.

MH: I get you.

B: Especially with poetry too. If you are in your own head and you don't care about the people around that are listening to you, ain't nobody gon' give a damn what you sayin'. But if you create a connection you can perform for 45 minutes, an hour, or an hour and a half.

MH: Okay, take me through the journey from high school to today.  The artistic journey.

B: High school had no idea I was an artist.  Plenty of study halls, I had no idea what I was going to do.  I was busy chasing my neighborhood girl.

MH: Were you academic then? Considering the schools you have attended since. 

B: I liked to read and I liked to talk and I liked to ask questions.   I was never the big mathematician.  I liked internalizing stories. I met Mr. Stella and he told me I could come to his little place, the art room and just paint. And I made bad paintings in high school. That became my character and I became a part of the art group in high school. I thought that would land me a scholarship in the best college in the world. Didn't happen. It's not enough to just paint and muscle your way through it. You gotta do the paper work and the research. I did do a Saturday program with the University of the Arts where I worked with a good friend Robo. Who ended up being a deisgner for Nike and Ecko. I graduated in 88.  Between 88 and 92 I was in the design world.  I was going to community college because that is what you do when you don't get those big scholarships. Community college of Philadephia had a great foundation arts program. I enjoyed it and met some really good people. I started hanging out with Amir Thompson  though he was in the music department.  He got me involved with "The Foreign Objects" and then he started the "Square Roots".

MH: I remember when it was the "Square Roots" and people would go see them at Silk City.

B: Yes, yes. I am skipping back and forth a little bit, but I made my first rap record with a group called "Too Brown" If you can find that record now it sells for like $200. [LAUGHS]

MH: That happens a lot. 

B: Kevon Glickman put it together.  Man, it was a bunch of us, and I just remember it was the first time I had to make a serious decision as to what I was gonna do, when the contracts came along. I went to the PVLA (Pennsylvania Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts) and they assigned me an attorney and he looked at the thing and was like, "Whoa Jack, slow down!"

MH: [LAUGH] That is one part of the arc.

B: It was a great learning experience. So while continuing with the art at the same time I am delving into performance. I am working with Roscoe Gill, choral director, he had me doing choral music.  So from hiphop to choral music.  Then Donald Dumpson who ran the gospel choir, I began singing with him. I loved to sing but in my head I was going to be the best rapper in the world and nothing was gonna stop me, but in the meantime I was going to get my education.

MH: The first time I remember meeting you was when you, Jill Scott and Rich Medina did a poetry performance at the Arts Bank.  

B: At Broad and South.

MH:  The three of you came in and blew the place apart. Talk about the spoken word era.

B: The spoken word chapter. I started getting involved in spoken word at "The Pen and Pencil Club" in Philadelphia they had an open mic venue and I did a poem called "Gas" about breaking wind.

MH: [LAUGH] I have heard you recite this piece.

B: Within that whole hiphop thing, my thing was independence.  I just wanted to say whatever I wanted to say. The first rap record that I put out, I did a piece called "Silly love song". A string of jokes put together in the form of a rap. "Girl you're cool like ice cubes sweet like sugar, stuck on you baby like a big green booger. I could call you snuggah, but you could call me snookem, serving breakfast lunch and dinner in a microwave I cook em." Just sayin' all kinds of things, If I wanted to be funny, I would be funny. If I wanted to be dramatic. Poetry, the person who inspired me to do that was Black Thought. At one of the homes doing poetry readings, I wrote out a rhyme and said let me speak this out. People got a chance to hear it and he said you should just do it as poetry or something like that.  So at the Pen and Pencil club I was the only black guy in the room.  I think it was a slam.  

MH: The Pen and Pencil club was that like in a back room.

B: Yeah yeah way in the back room on Latimer Street.

MH: Wow, you just took me back. I remember there was a sistah who was doing writing workshops in there.

B: So somebody said it reminded them of Langston Hughes.  I was like I heard of him before. [LAUGHING] So I started to read more poetry. 

MH:  My biggest gripe with the poetry scene is the poet who is not a reader of other people. To me that is the death of the art. It comes full circle, when your time comes people will buy your book and it makes sure that you are not saying something that has already been said, better.

B: Exactly. You can find shortcuts through problems.  I talk to my nephew , he's into spoken word, one thing we all did was write this long huge epic poem.

MH: [LAUGH]

B: You have to watch 'cause if you go too long you have no choice but to repeat yourself. Find a way to be concise. It's important and there is no better way than to read other people who have had similar feelings. Gil Scott Heron had short poems that are just as powerful.

MH: Okay so back to the arc.  Should we go into the painting section?

B: Okay so the spoken word and the hiphop journey ended up intermingling. In the 90's it was all connected.

MH: It was, I remember "The Roots" had Ursula Rucker on their album. Who I saw about the place as a poet at that time.

B:  She was pure poetry. She was the first poet I knew that was touring overseas doing things. I found myself having a little taste Cornell Rochester saw me at one of the Roots functions and took me out to Helsinki, Finland to a jazz festival. I met the Last Poets they were there.

MH:  They were the other known touring poets.

B:  I remember talking to Jalal Nuriddin (aka Alafia Pudim) about Gil Scott Heron and he took his long cigarette holder out of his mouth and said "He was one of our students."

MH: [LAUGH]

B: That was a whole 'nother level. I was like yo! Okay. Then I learned that he had written the "Hustlers Convention" under the name Lightin' Rod. That one particular poem I had experienced because the DJ that produced the Too Brown album. [PAUSE] When you used to be a rapper and you used to hang with the DJ you would listen to all the music, you were passing the records. You would sit there and interact with all this wax. "Hustlers Convention" was one of those.

It taught me that there was something else in poetry other than just flowers.

MH: [LAUGHS] And the love poem.

B: The deeper level that comes with experience. And of course there is the slams.  You win a couple dollars.

MH:  I've never won a slam. [LAUGH]

B: The trick, well not the trick, what worked in my favor was being an oddball poet.

MH: I would say unique style.  Unique wins out in the arts. Hold up back to the arc. Talk about the MFA.

B: I was at Tyler school of art I wanted to get my bachelors degree in painting. I wanted to learn, absorb everything you could teach me about painting. I knew that the only way to really surround myself with artists who knew a lot more with my level of access was to do it academically. I went right to painting. Got my bachelors then I went to work for the Mural Arts, doing neighborhood murals in the worst neighborhoods they could find. They were fun. It was a direct communication with these neighbors. The important thing was I could interact with the people in the neighborhoods. Then I wound up going to the University of Pennsylvania.  I was one of 12 people. I was among some amazing artists. The amount of access that that affords you is incredible. It wasn't so much a training in painting but a training in thinking. Doing it at the ivy league, you know the University of Pennsylvania meant something to me. If some people did not get into that school they would jump off a building and have.

MH: Indeed.

B: That journey learning to fight for your ideas, fight for your concepts and fight to get it through.  You know argue out your point.  You learn some people are not ready for that battle.  A lot of people fall off.

MH: The fight for ideas. 

[FIST BUMP]

B: [POINTING AT HIS PAINTING] She was standing right there. Queen Kinshasa.  She was the only person presented like this at that National Arts Program show. Win or lose, 'cause you know you have a cash reward, it is the battle of ideas. And she exists.

MH: That is the fight. There is so much to fight for.  The beauty of and the recognition of the black, the sistah and us. Recognize that I am putting this sistah here for you to acknowledge and admire.

B:  Let me tell you how bold I am. When I got out of the University of Penn I had a ten foot by five and a half foot wide portrait of a sistah and I put it in the hallway, and "I said I'll get it later."

MH: [LAUGHS]

B: They had to call me to take it down. I don't know how many years it was before another sistah may have gone through that program but she was up there.  

MH:  Thanks Bernard.

Editor's note:

Bernard is actively performing, singing, exhibiting his work and teaching in the Philadelphia area.

http://www.bernardcollinsjr.com/

[mightyhip]

Bernard Collins Jr.  is also a blues singer.  He's MightyHip!