“Rhapsody in Knowledge” Melrose Library Plaza-Roanoke, VA 2020

My work over the decades has addressed and suggested ways to integrate and cultivate diversity, directly engaging with inter-community dialogue that crosses generations and cultures.

The entirety of my artistic practice has consistently engaged in building community and removing barriers through visual engagement projects in the arts. I intend for my work to encourage social justice, access, resilience, and racial equality.

My overarching interest is to create work that reflects a sense of community and what I call “visual music,” a syncopated rhapsody of colors, shapes, symbols and rhythms that stimulate the senses bringing people together. Allowing the community to participated as my co-collaborators through schools and civic organizations directly connects the neighborhood to this work.

The curvilinear outline and agitated color patterns resemble the activity that happens at a library. The library stitches a community together in ways that its linear streets cannot. One must negotiate interactions of compassion, caution, give and take, as well as gestures of respect and common courtesy to arrive at this new circle of life, community.

"The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but rather, the reality of the force the thing contains."

James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

Napoleon Jones-Henderson © 2019

“Rhapsody in Knowledge”-rear view