Joe King

My name is Joseph Martin King.

I am a very eclectic artist who has made Spokane’s Inland Northwest region my home for the past 20 years. I’m a transplant from the southern metropolitan area of Chicago Illinois. As an artist whose creativity is embodied in the cultural influences of Hip Hop, provides rationale for my indiscriminative usage of a wide range of mediums collaboratively. I consider myself to be an extraordinary individual. I’m quite different from most of my peers. I’ve been given a natural talent to transcend groups. As a young African American, I have always been very curious of other cultures and races. Living in the mid- west exposed me to a very diverse population and my curiosities of that diversity led me to a cultural sensitivity and ability to transcend groups. There has never been any box to place me in.

During my youth I found education to be dissatisfying and often brutal. Having come from a family that was lukewarm about academia, my father was a high school dropout and my mother’s educational peak was eighth grade -I didn’t feel strongly about any kind of learning. The only area that I was actually interested at the time was writing; it was the one medium in which I felt comfortable, rap music and goals of becoming a rapper led to a gifted writing aesthetic.

Due to my empirical experience as an urban minority youth who comes from the unforgiving streets of Chicago, Illinois, I have developed the usage of aesthetics to enact micro-politics, and ethnographical guidance and cultivation.

Growing up in an urban sub-culture gave me extremely valuable tools and life skills. I have survived an extraordinary violent, a dilapidating ignorant, and a horrifically impoverished environment. I have beaten most odds that young black youth face today with grace and humility.

At present, I consider myself to be an activist and advocate. I am an advocate for men that are in the perpetual cycle of domestic violence I am committed to an unconventional approach to changing the hearts and minds of men who have been abused and or abusive. I am an activist for the disenfranchised who suffer discrimination and taxation without representation. I have been very instrumental in lobbying for policy changes in Washington State concerning felony voting rights. I believe that my previous years of hardship and discrimination have developed my character. It has not made me bitter; it has made me better. Life has been my classroom, and adversities, my exams. My memoirs, stories, and experiences I will eventually publish in a book entitled “Successful Failures and Unexpected Accomplishments”.

My rehabilitation has come in the form of higher education, self-assessment, self-understanding, and realization. Becoming maladjusted helped me to tap into resources that led to my discovery of self, through education. Being a high school dropout that suffered from social, physical, and psychological abuse, I became empowered when a Spokane mental health counselor convinced me to pursue education as a means to discover and rid myself of internal issues that plague me.

I have engaged in self-uplift and development. I have evolved into an individual who desires to change, while reaching back for those who don’t have the self-efficacy or resources to mount an attempt.

As you will see, my art is also evolving as I learn more about the Diaspora and the African progeny worldwide. If my body of work affects you in any way emotionally, please use the experience to discover an honest and genuine self-discovery using a one word question during self- thought. Why?

Enjoy.

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