At present we are completing a book and DVD which is a complete revision of a previous work titled The James Baldwin Anthology.
The book Nobody Knew You Name, includes a group of images done as a memorial, plus a transcript of his historic speech delivered at UC Berkeley in 1979, quotes from his work, and a section Remembering Jimmy, by assorted writers. The DVD contains his 1979 speech introduced by Angela Davis, plus the series of mixed media images, his part of a dialogue with Malcolm X, an interview with Professor Erskine Peters, and a section with David Lemmings, author of the known biography James Baldwin, describing Jimmy's long friendship with artist Bueford Delaney.
I met and became friends with James Baldwin at age eighteen . I took the photograph of him, smoking a cigarette at the time, when he had begun his novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, which was at the time titled Crying Holy. We remained friends through his long exile in Europe, corresponding when he was in France and Corsica where he wrote Giovanni's Room.
After his death I began to work with his image. Then I went to a group of large watercolors . I dreamt that he told me to do them, and to always start them with an accident. In my dream he was Skyboss, as he had been before in a series of dreams that began in 1976.
After the large watercolors I went back to the small images I had made by cutting up a print of my photograph of him and placing other images in the parts cut out. His face, with its large expressive eyes, continued to haunt me. I then took snapshots of the large watercolors and made many-copies of the picture taken of him just after he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High school in the Bronx where he contributed a bunch of writing to The Magpie.
One day later I dreamt again that he was Skyboss. In the dream he said "Put your paintings in the middle of my forehead." The watercolors were large and the photographs were small so I explained that it would be impossible.
"You'll figure out a way," he said, and smiled.That's why I took the snapshots and placed them where they are. After my husband, Bradley Burch, died in 1967 Jimmy appeared in a dream, telling me to write sarcastic variations of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. I did and they can be found in a book titled Homeless in the 90's.
