Anthony Russell, a 2020 graduate from Bishop O’Byrne High School, has created an anti-racism-inspired art collection called Fear of the Unknown that is turning heads in the local art world and in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Russell’s work is currently displayed in the Arts Commons Plus-15 galleries.
“I didn’t feel like I would be heard if I just went to a protest screaming ‘I Can’t Breathe’ and ‘Black Lives Matter,'” Russell told CBC News. “So I made this art to actually get awareness that this stuff is real, like this stuff is still happening in today’s society. And we shouldn’t be taken lightly.”
Russell, who has just graduated from Bishop O’Byrne High School, has now created a custom Instagram page to display his work.
One piece is particularly personal for Russell, who is Jamaican Canadian.
“There is a piece currently untitled in my exhibition that pictures me stenciled in a Walmart, and is touching on the subject that whenever I walk into a store with a backpack or with a few of my friends, we’re always getting followed or looked at,” he said.
“The reason why my exhibition is called the Fear of the Unknown is that there is a fear that comes with the way people look at us and treat us within society just because they don’t know us.”
Russell says he hopes to give people a glimpse into what it’s like to be a young Black man, and a sense of the hardships that can bring.
The Helment, Russell’s first piece, was inspired by Colin Kaepernick taking a knee.
One of his most recent, created after his exhibit was already in place at Arts Commons, was inspired by the death of George Floyd. Russell says he couldn’t wrap his head around why the cop continued to kneel on Floyd’s neck, when he was complying.
That last piece inspired him to start his own Instagram page to showcase the collection.
Russell works mostly in the medium of multi-coloured stencils. David Nielsen, who teaches visual arts at Bishop O’Byrne High School, describes Russell’s work as incredible.
“He is smart as a whip and very talented … all his work is so very timely,” Nielsen wrote in an email to CBC, adding that Russell’s one-man exhibit at the Art Commons Plus-15 galleries made him “the first high school student in Calgary to exhibit there.”
Russell credits his art teacher for encouraging him to showcase his talent, but has clearly found his own voice.
“I never really worry about people looking at me different, because it’s just ignorant, unintelligent people that just don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. “They don’t know who I am as a person.”
Anthony Russell is a 2020 grad at Bishop O’Byrne High School in Calgary, seen here with his visual arts teacher, David Nielsen. (Submitted by Agel Atak)
Russell’s work touches on his own experiences as a young Black man in Canada.
“Because we are a minority at the school, there is only a few Black people. We all have to stick together. We all know each other and we always try to bring each other up because if we don’t, no one else really does it for us.”
Russell, 18, says the current situation requires speaking out, but that he has hope for being able to bring change.
“I am not fearful of what’s going to happen after this high school experience because I know that things can and will get better,” he said. “Yes, racism still exists now in Calgary, in Canada, all across the world, but that doesn’t mean that we should live in fear, that we are never going to be treated as equals.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
