West Harlem Art Fund in partnership with NY Artist Equity Association is seeking to present Coby Kennedy’s Delonte Crossing 110th Street this spring in Morningside Park. This is a bold work that will spark conversations about shaping identity. How do marginalized people define their own image and bring healing.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The core theme behind the sculpture is the celebration of black ingenuity throughout the diaspora, especially here in the United States where our people have had our history literally erased, and yet we’ve pulled from an unbelievable wealth of creativity and ingenuity to manufacture, our own foundation of identity, individuality, innovation, and culture that has now influenced the entire planet.

In this nation, where for 400 years, we’ve been placated with the scraps off the table, we’ve made solid gold out of these scraps. Much like, quite literally, with soul food from the era when we were enslaved, we were thrown the parts of animals that people couldn’t or refuse to eat, and we took that offending gesture, and turned it into high cuisine, so do we take the meager objects that we have within reach and create high art with them. Jazz, R&B, hip-hop, House, techno, jungle, & drum and bass all came from black kids in their bedroom with third hand pawn shop bought music equipment, creating musical genres that changed history. This Sculpture specifically honors the black kids of Harlem who, much like their contemporaries in Baltimore and across the river in Brooklyn, have taken cheap low gear, two-stroke dirt bike motorcycles originally made for Midwest redneck, white kids to roll around in the mud with, and repurposed them to America’s asphalt, urban cities, branding these machines as polished, tricked out symbols of social status and grandeur, and elevated what was intended to be simply riding a bike into an unbelievably dynamic art form. The contortions, movements, bodily positions and sheer daring is on par with avant-garde dance in theater. To see a young black youth defying gravity , flying down the avenue at 25 miles an hour with one foot on the rear fender of a two stroke motorcycle, standing straight up in the air on its back wheel with one hand raised in the peace sign, and the other leg kicked over the front handlebars leaning to the left as the bike bends to the right, images of Alvin Ailey dance performers, frozen in air come directly to mind. Iconic Images of Michael Jordan caught in mid flight that defined an era, Olympic athletes with their limbs and torso, stretched and contorted, pushing the limits of the physical body to their fullest caught in moments of contortion that resemble Oil paintings full of emotion, skill, and epic drive to express themselves.

In this sculpture, Delonte Crossing 110th Street, the pose that the rider evokes directly references the famous painting, Napoleon Crossing the Alps. The Alps become Harlem’s southern border street, Napoleon‘s horse becomes Delonte’s low gear two stroke dirt bike, and the 19th century European conquerer waving an imperialist hand overhead becomes a black American youth who survived imperialism attaining their own place of respect and grandeur in the pantheon of history while waving the universal sign of peace above their head.

The sculpture is the celebration and embodiment of a people stripped of their culture, stripped of history, stripped of their dignity, finding the power to make something out of nothing and attain those attributes and more while existing within the confines of a system that’s been built, from the foundation, to erase them as people of worth. A snapshot of a simple brazen act that at once echoes the power of centuries of European high art, continues the tradition of black creativity, and beautifully radiates the highest and most respected subtle virtues of contemporary American negritude that have enabled our culture to survive the Homeric journey through these generations.

COBY KENNEDY