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Read his book first,
Identity Theft - Creations from a Social Conscience.
“I am one of the fortunate ones. Had I believed what I was being taught in school, I would never have known the true meaning and greatness of my last name, “Chukes.”
– Michael Chukes
We often hear that slavery was our country's original sin, but that’s not accurate. It has been 248 years since the founding of the United States, and this is our enduring shame, one that has wreaked suffering on no less than ten generations. Michael Chukes’s work is a barometer of this social consciousness, measuring, no, warning of the enduring build-up of pressure and pain.
Slavery is a hard history – a hard and meaningful conversation – but Chukes (as he prefers to be called) challenges ignorance, perception, and distraction in a quest for communal enlightenment. In his 2023 book Identity Theft - Creations from a Social Conscience, Chukes reflects on forgotten and untaught histories, asking his readers to “start asking questions about your history! Start by asking your elders, and don’t hold back.” Although his work captures the sensory knowledge of enduring suffering, David Pagel, Professor of Art Theory and History at the Claremont Graduate University, notes that it’s “not just pointing out the tragic, century-spanning losses of having one’s self stolen, but by repairing the damage, and then some.”
As I write this article, the 2024 political machine is marching forward. This article is in no way meant to tether Chukes’s work to the current political conversation. He expressed in a 2024 interview with me that “I can't just create, for the sake of creating, because of the environment that I live in, the world that I live in, the understanding of self and who I am, and this energy I've been given to be this creative person. All of those things affect you. So as a result of it, my work has a political attitude or philosophy behind it.” This is all to say that Chukes’s work has survived forty years of the political leanings of seven presidents; this isn't a "one-off trend" for Chukes. As a native Californian, and in the 90s during the brutal beating of Rodney King, Chukes wasn't making art in response to this event. The same goes for events that include Trayvon Martin (2012), George Floyd (2020), and hundreds of other Black men and women who unjustly lost their lives. Although Chukes's work is inherently political, it’s not necessarily reactionary. This is his life's work, and it is more akin to an exploration of his sensory experiences and his emotions.
The emotional spectrum within Chukes's work is far broader than the political or traditional sense of activism. It's political in the sense of what it is to be a parent, what it is to be a person experiencing love and hate. Chukes reflects, “I can deal with the ugliness of the world. Even if I choose to create something that's an ugly event, I still want people to see that there's beauty in the world. I haven't lost hope.” Chukes’s work is seamless in capturing frozen-moment sensations that can often represent counter-narratives to the beauty within his forms and surfaces. They represent trauma and suffering, but he states, “I want people to know that I've never lost my sense of love, my sense of love for humanity. When you look at a piece representing a terrible moment, you can see, and I can say, this is terrible, but I'm still beautiful. I haven't let it ruin me or tear me apart. I love – I'm still a good person."
Chukes was born in Vallejo, California, and moved with his family to San Jose, California, as a young boy. As Chukes reflects on his childhood, he speaks in terms of sensory experiences – the light, the sounds, the touch of his youth. He speaks fondly of moments of creative validation from his parents and friends. He points to a specific memory when his legs were badly cut, and he had to receive a significant amount of stitches. He was kept home to complete his recovery but distinctly remembers one afternoon, the familiar sound of a knock. Deeply tuned into his senses and even from his bedroom, he knew that sound to be his friends. He and his friends had played with tinker toys and reveled in childhood critiques of their creations, but he was often the one still playing with the tinker toys as his friends went off to find new entertainment. His friends, on this particular afternoon, had left a box of tinker toys for him to play with while he recovered. The moment was validating because it let him know that people witnessed him and his joy for creation.
In these moments of profound memory, Chukes is clear to delineate the difference between being celebrated for the objects he creates and being celebrated for being himself. Validation for one’s identity is key to Chukes as he relates his youth, because he is quick to diminish the youthful objects he made by laughing at how he just added that box of tinker toys back to the friendship pile they all used.
In our conversation, I point to the use of femininity in Chukes iconography, and this, too, comes back to a profound childhood memory steeped in sensory recountings. Chukes pinpointed a moment in school where he was chastised: “Michael, you gotta put the book down, put the paper down, and stop drawing!” His teacher scolded. “But I wouldn't. I just wouldn't. I wouldn't listen to her,” he recounts with emphatic determination. Chukes continues, “Finally, she got so upset with me that she said, “Go home!” because I just would not listen to her. I was a good student. I wasn't disrespectful for anything, but in this moment there was just an energy in me. I just couldn't control myself.” Chukes leaves school in tears and fears the repercussions of his mother and the story that will be relayed to his father. His mother greets him as he arrives back home with, “Well, why are you home?” He tries to explain that his teacher sent him home, and his mother's response was, “What did you do?” As Chukes thinks of his response to his mother, he continues his story by asking, “Can I show you? And I pulled the paper out of my binder and gave it to my mom, and she looked at it. And she said, “Son, that's beautiful.” She didn't scold me or anything.”
“That right there told me this is going to be my life. Art is going to be my life.”
“She called me Michelangelo, and I didn't even know who Michelangelo was. She saw it in me.” It’s in honoring these instances of positive, confident, and empowering femininity that Chukes celebrates the feminine form within his art. These women throughout Chukes life provided validation and the nurturing sensations that are palpable in his storytelling and his creations.
"The female is everywhere in art and life. Just look around you, and you will see! They birth and nurture humanity, even during times when it seems like there is no hope! The life they carry is most often a gift and, at other times, a terrible curse, yet the female perseveres like the unending and expanding universe. As a male, I could never imagine what it would be like to give birth to another human. The closest I will ever get is creating art that expresses the truest and most profound meaning of my life! I never take the female or my art for granted; I come from the female. The female is the greatest work of art ever created. I am their clay!"[1]
Chukes also reflects on his book Identity Theft - Creations from a Social Conscience and the impact his wife and sole-mate Rhonda Chukes had on empowering his intentions to publish. “Truth Matters. That's why writing my own book was important for me, because in history, especially for many black artists, someone else from another culture or another race has written their history. When I wrote Identity Theft, I wanted the words to come from me. I wanted my book to be the first, the precedent. If you are interested in my art, read this book first. It is important for me that you hear my voice first while I'm alive.” Rhonda is an esteemed librarian, collector, and curator who understood the value of Chukes's experience and the Black experience in the written context. Chukes reflects on his publishing decisions, “I was going to self-publish. And she said, 'No, this book is too good. We need to find the right people.' And she was right; she understands who I am as an artist, and I understand who she is as my wife and as a librarian. We have a profound respect for one another.”
As I write this, it seems contradictory to say, read this article but read Identity Theft first. If you've gotten this far in my critique, you won't be judged for working in the reverse order of operations, but it goes without saying that Chukes’s 160-page book will not disappoint. He takes readers on a journey of finding his own identity and non-violent approach to bringing awareness, and one of the most striking aspects of the book is how it seamlessly weaves the history of his art with contemporary interpretations. Each illustration is accompanied by insightful commentary that provides context and background, allowing the reader to appreciate the works' aesthetic qualities and cultural and historical significance.
Reading Chukes’s book is a joy, but it is a tight second place in the emotive experience of viewing his work in person. Chukes concentrates on and captures the emotional sensations of the body rather than physical objecthood or a strict narration. He “appeals for the restitution of sensory knowledge, symbolized by the unity of hand, head, and heart.”[2] Chukes taps into the emotional sensations he processes and sets his art to deliver the message. “I want the world to see what they have given me and what I have taken inside of me. Then I let all of that energy and emotion go through the entirety of my body, and I recreate those thoughts back into the art.”
The shame of our forefather's justification for slavery can seem like an antiquated policy, but it has left a desperate trail of victimization that is felt every day. What strikes me in Chukes’s work is the visual lineage of affirmation. He doesn't leave his figurative sculptures in a suspended and eternal state of victimization. His work has evolved over the past forty years; an emotive posturing, an ownership of one's self, emerges as his art develops in his timeline. Maybe, if I had to put words to it, this visual sensation I'm receiving is similar to when I set boundaries because I know I deserve to be cared for, and I know what it feels like to be hurt. Is that empowerment? Pride? Self-love? Resilience? It’s neither here nor there because it is an intangible collective sensibility. I will leave it to my body to feel the work. This is the art and politics of affirmation, one that creates the conditions for an emotionally sustainable future.
“Chukes is my African last name. I don't think I'm any better than anyone else, but I'm fortunate enough to use and to know that my last name was not given to me by a slave owner. I think we were part of the last tribes that came to America, so we still knew our last name. When slavery ended, we were able to reclaim that part of ourselves.
“Our history has been totally stripped from us.
“Knowing your history should be like knowing your own name. Even if you lost your original African name, there are still many methods to help guide you in the search for your true identity.”
In the summer of 1985, Chukes learned the meaning of his name. Chukes recounts in his book, “I can remember it like it was yesterday.” A man named Sam was admiring Chukes’s art at the Juneteenth festival in San Jose, California. As Chukes recalls, “He had a certain air of confidence about him as an African that I did not possess within myself as an African-American (I find this hard to say). It was as if Sam was a messenger, sent to give me vital information that would greatly redirect my limited vision of the world and change my life forever.” Sam was Sengaleese and informed Chukes that his name originated from Nigeria. According to Sam, Chukes meant “Man of God and most-high. He said it also represented the African Wuru bird that flies around and sees everything.”[3]
“The knowledge of my last name has been one of my greatest gifts.”
In the twenty-first century, the diaspora of many cultures has left us wanting a sacred truth. Tony Fry, a design theorist who writes on the relationship between design, unsustainability, and politics, asserts that “it is by the hand, with care as craft, that the scared can be made.”[4] This is to say that “care for self and future, as a working practice toward a quality of the being of objects, and being with objects, clearly is inseparable from the quality of survival of all being.”[5] Although these passages are geared towards material sustainability within art, I believe Chukes keys in on emotional sustainability in parallel connections to the idea of care.
Care for oneself.
In his 2017 portrait piece “Africans Only,” he recreates the sculptures of the Benin King and Queen of Nigeria. Much like Chukes, these pieces are literal and metaphorical mirrors of the social consciousness they receive and reflect. A little girl peers into the reflective surface to see her face framed and celebrated in the adornment of a queen's regalia. Seeing oneself in the face of a queen or king nurtures the subconscious spirit.
Moreover, in his piece “Protector of the Next Generation,” – which is featured on the cover of his book – we see a Black man cradling a child, cradling his legacy. Chukes describes why he created this composition in his book: “I wanted to capture a familiar and positive vision of the Black male that expresses his love and commitment to the children of the world. The scenario is rarely depicted in American media.” He continues this line of thought in our conversation: “Negativity and victimhood were what I learned about myself through the educational process. Every time I was taught anything about myself from elementary school to college, it was always from the slave or the enslaved narrative. So, all I ever heard was that all black people came from slavery. And then I said, 'No, that's not right.' I mean, what were we before we were enslaved? So, I had to go back and research the true origin of who we are as a people. When you look at history, you see that the first people came from the continent of Africa, and we've migrated throughout this planet – our history won't teach us that, so they act like we didn't start existing until we were captured from our primitivism of Africa.”
“We were the creators of humanity.”
“We were the beginning of humanity and have never been given credit for that in our history.”
Chukes's work is the visual embodiment of nurturing. On the one hand, this sentiment can feel passive or imply a quiet figure ready on the sideline, but on the other hand and in reality, Chukes's work is grand in scale. The work lives up to the full potential of big and meaningful conversations. While nurturing, there is nothing meek about the physical presence of his work. His work acknowledges the ugly truth, challenges it, and champions gentle caresses, undying love, and self-care. His series and book Identity Theft balance oppression with stories of resilience and agency and are vibrant reminders of the multidimensional history of the Black experience.
NOTES
[1] Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1998), 23.
[2] Michael Chukes, Artist Statement, https://chukesart.com/home.html, accessed May 2024.
[3] Michael Chukes, Identity Theft - Creations from a Social Conscience (Pasadena: Segest Press, 2023), 18.
[4] Tony Fry, "Sacred Design I: A Re-creational Theory," Discovering Design" Explorations in Design Studies, ed. Richard Buchanan and Victor Marlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 211.
[5] Ibid., 207.