Amiri Kudura Barksdale was born in 1974 in South Central, Los Angeles, California. At the age of 7 he moved with his mother and 3-day-old brother to Third Ward, Houston, Texas. He remained there until 1992, when he went on to study religion and political science, graduating from Dartmouth College in 1997. Since 1998 he has lived and worked in New York City.
Although he has been drawing and painting his entire life, he did not become serious about pursuing art until 1998, when he realized the significance of the fact that the first thing he bought upon getting his paltry first paycheck in his first apartment in Brooklyn was a set of acrylics. He has been painting steadily and more or less seriously since.
A self-taught artist, he is familiar with the Renaissance cycle and especially close to the arc of Modernism. In 2004-2006 he was working on a series of narrative paintings, loosely grouped under the heading "Funky, Krunk and Boojey Junk," the purpose of which was both to affirm this type of painting as necessary in contemporary life, and to retrieve strong content, not as the mere object of a painting, as in a still life, but to rediscover painting as a mode of communication and signification that can mean more than it appears to, without resort to tomes of art-theoretical literature. The criterion for such a task would be legibility to the patient eye of the layman.
A lot of that work is about history, memory, and family; a sense of domicile, a place to belong, however dysfunctional or otherwise compromised. This is the place where you want to go, how you want to remember, appropriately warm or cool, orange or blue, red or green. These colors belong together, like you belong with your history, your loves, your family...
Since summer 2006, he has been experimenting with other techniques and processes.
Artistic influences and favorites, though not always obvious, are Paul Klee, Verists like Georg Grosz and Otto Dix; Orphists and the Blaue Reiter, especially Franz Marc; and the Mexican muralists Rivera and Orozco. John Biggers is a more contemporary guiding light.
