Presenting
The artist
Darryl A Chamberlain
Artist's Statement
My love for art goes all the way back to my childhood where my mother first encouraged me to draw. I had a love for cartoons and as soon as I found out that our encyclopedias had a section on Walt Disney cartoons, I was trying to sketch them all. Eventually I would get to a place where I could draw any Disney character from memory. Disney was my hero.
My sculpting experience goes back to the third grade where my teacher gave me a large lump of non-hardening clay which I would practice with every day. Art has always been a part of my life. As a child, I drew on everything I could find. I drew on notebook paper or would tear open empty cereal boxes, paper sacks, even sketch on the want ad section of the newspaper. I have always loved art dearly.
I am a person with a passion for humanity. I am also an idealist who thinks that things will always get better and if they don't, I am always looking for ways to make things better.
More recently, I became concerned about the deterioration of relationships between blacks and whites in America due to misunderstandings. During the 80's all of the major magazines had run a story about the angry white male. Moreover, talk show hosts emerged to popularize the vilification of terms like preferential treatment and affirmative action. It seemed to me that a lot of this rhetoric came from the lack of understanding. I came up with a novel idea to use my art to try to bridge the gaps of misunderstanding between people of our country.
I have had a unique upbringing in Kansas city Missouri that caused me to take this position. I was one of 43 kids who were a part of Kansas city's first experiment with integration. I learned through that experiment that there were some good people out there and, in spite of the racial hostilities of that time, there were those persons who were determined to rise above the banes of society to make their communities a more tolerant place to live. I try to to be that kind of person.
There have been moments, however, in the recent present where I have experienced things that have caused me an element of concern as I had thought the American people learned to rise above some of the immaturities of the past. My first recent experience was when I graduated technical school for electronics in Kansas city. I worked hard to be one of the top students in my class only to find that there those who thought the only reason I was received good grades was because I must have been cheating. Even more so, I was dismayed to find out that in spite of being one of the top students in my class, my placement director was placing the white students at the good paying positions at places like Texas Instruments while he was telling me that there were no positions available.
I got to Texas Instruments by accident only to find many of my classmates had been placed there by my school as much as six months before I was hired. Some of these students were the people who would come to me for answers.
Today, I get a little touched when I hear all of the rhetoric about preferential treatment of minorities when there is a form of affirmative action that works for whites that exists even to this day. My placement director taught me that. 21 years of experience in the semiconductor industry has shown me even more. Many of the people who experience this preferential treatment for whites are the ones who join in the rhetoric in regards to affirmative action for minorities.
I have had other experiences where when visiting white churches I have been encouraged by the church greeter to go seek out the black church around the corner. My third-grade son came home from school to tell me that a classmate would not play with him because her pastor told her that blacks and whites should not get married and she was afraid that he might fall in love with her. A school teacher with at least four years of schooling told me that black skin was burnt skin. Two coaches have told my kids that blacks run faster because they have a third muscle. I could go on and on about such experiences. These are not experiences from the Civil Rights Era, but modern-day experiences from people they you may know. These experiences let me know that we still have a long way to go. Moreover, these people took the positions that they did because they were not educated about people who were different from themselves.
I chose not to become angry or bitter about them but rather counted these errors to misunderstanding due to the lack of the teaching of African-American history in our country. I am convinced that proper education will remove a mountain of ignorance. Such being the case, I developed The Gloryworks Experience as a tool that will help educators in their quest to thoroughly educate the whole student. Because I sought a positive method to deal with a long-time negative, it was my determination that the tools and presentations of The Gloryworks Experience maintain a positive perspective as we move forward from ignorance to knowledge and understanding.