This talk and exhibition was presented to the Spokane South Hill Rotary Club during Black History Month 2025.
Part 1
The pictures are illustrations of crucifixions. Historically Black men have been crucified. It may have been dying stacked in slave ships, it may have been hanging from a tree during slavery, it may have been jailing after Reconstruction, it may have been in the media, it may have been psychological. The talk that went with these images was about my personal psychological crucifixions.
Part 2
Women have been crucified through time also, be it body shaming, be it cultural taboos, be it cultural appropriation, be it political correctness.
Part 3
When your dad gives you millions of dollars you think that they are toys for you to play with. Because you’re rich you think you have access to women that you can fondle, sexually abuse and dominate. You think you can trample on the American flag and on democracy. You’ve been a thug all of your life. Any Black person who did any of these things would have ended up in prison garb.
Join us for celebrations of art spirit and spark of life
Plants and Lovers at Garden Party 107 S Madison St, Spokane WA Oct 6, 2023 5pm Oct 6 – 29 Wed – Sun 11 am Visit Garden Party
Fly on the Wall Part 1 at Hamilton Studio 1427 W Dean St, Spokane WA Nov 3 2023 5 pm Talk at 7 pm
Fly on the Wall Part 2 at Carl Maxey Center 3114 E 5th Ave, Spokane WA Mon – Fri 10 am – 4 pm Gallery Premier Opening Dec 1, 2023 5 pm
Plants and Lovers at Garden Party
Artist Statement
Robert has always had an interest in social justice, community development and the visual arts. His explorations started with a Brownie Hawkeye camera through digital imaging and Artificial Intelligence Art. He has explored film sizes and materials, printing processes from the mimeograph machine through letter press, offset to inkjet. He’s explored imagery from illustration to the pictorial and the conceptual. This body of work, Eros, was inspired by his wife’s love of the garden and the non-violent teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King and his sermon on love – AGAPE, EROS, PHILIA.
Eros is an aesthetic love of beautiful literature and art. It has also come to mean a romantic love that we experience when we find someone that is attractive and to whom we pour out all of our love.
Biography
Robert Lloyd was an organizer and documentary photographer in the Chicago Freedom Movement from 1962-1967. In 1974 he completed an MFA in Design and Photography at California Institute of the Arts and began teaching photography at Eastern Washington University. He founded, directed, and curated The Grand Photography Gallery at Eastern Washington University and The Lloyd Gallery at 123 Arts.
From 1996-2000 he founded and published a community newspaper, the Spokane African American Voice. He retired from Eastern Washington University in 2004 after 30 years of teaching photography and digital imaging. After his retirement he photographed in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, China and Japan and he photographed for The Black Lens News. His work has been recently exhibited at Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in the Black Lives Matter Artist Grant exhibit, Charles Ball in the letter L in the Black Lives Matter Mural in Spokane Washington, and in Our Voices Our Visions, the exhibit he curated for the opening of the Carl Maxey Center featuring 25 BIPOC artists. He can be reached at rdlloyd@comcast.net and website 4comculture.com
Robert Lloyd’s Multimedia Images Price List
8 1/2 x 11: First Friday Exhibition Price $35.00 each unframed
Available online in these formats:
Premium art papers:
8 1/2 x 11 $ 50.00
11 x 17 $ 75.00
Diptych $100.00
Triptych $125.00
Quadriptych $150.00
Rag or Watercolor Paper or Sunset Canvas w/border:
11 x 14 $100.00
16 x 20 $125.00
20 x 24 $150.00
24 x 36 $200.00
Canvas stretched on #4 bar gallery wrap:
16 x 20 $220.00
18 x 24 $245.00
24 x 36 $450.00
Additional sizes and paper surfaces available.
Matting and framing available. Ask for quote.
Shipping available additional.
Homage to the Past, Hope & Inspiration for the Future
Black Women are inspiring their peers and other generations to break the stereotypes that are often associated with aging. The idea for this work comes from a Chicago Black women’s band The KCR Ensemble, led by 75 year old guitarist Rita Hassell and managed by her husband Oliver Hassell.
The art is not portraits of the KCR Ensemble members, but follows the pattern of and pays homage to these women who are playing the classics, the music from the diaspora, contemporary and futuristic jazz.
The images pay homage to art that has gone before, art media, and cutting edge art of today.
Now the work is available in our concert halls and internet venues.
Homage to the Past, Hope & Inspiration for the Future
Black Women are inspiring their peers and other generations to break the stereotypes that are often associated with aging. The idea for this work comes from a Chicago Black women’s band The KCR Ensemble, led by 75 year old guitarist Rita Hassell and managed by her husband Oliver Hassell. Here they are: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=youtu.be%2FX3KYqgv2vWY
The art is not portraits of the KCR Ensemble members, but follows the pattern of and pays homage to these women who are playing the classics, the music from the diaspora, contemporary and futuristic jazz.
The images pay homage to art that has gone before, art media, and cutting edge art of today.
I just received a very nice book that was just published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Black American Portraits. I seem to have missed the publication deadline as none of my portraits appear to be in the book.
So to keep you up to date I will be publishing an African American portrait every Tuesday. See you on Tuesdays!
Homage to the Past, Hope & Inspiration for the Future
Black Women are inspiring their peers and other generations to break the stereotypes that are often associated with aging. The idea for this work comes from a Chicago Black women’s band The KCR Ensemble, led by 75 year old guitarist Rita Hassell and managed by her husband Oliver Hassell. Here they are: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=youtu.be%2FX3KYqgv2vWY The art is not portraits of the KCR Ensemble members, but follows the pattern of and pays homage to these women who are playing the classics, the music from the diaspora, contemporary and futuristic jazz. The images pay homage to art that has gone before, art media, and cutting edge art of today.
Sometimes we can’t wait on the cavalry! Let’s put the wagons in a circle. The battle has begun! We are under attack, we must do the best we can with what we have. The creative will have the best chance for survival. It’s good to be prepared and independent but in times like this we need to be inter-dependent.
Spokane Public School District 81 is looking for nominations for names of new schools and buildings. We nominated Frances Scott for the new middle school in NE Spokane on Foothills Drive. We also nominated Ruben Trejo (see the link) for the new building for the On Track Academy located on the Shaw Campus.
Frances Scott 1921 – 2010
Scott was one of Spokane’s remarkable people – the city’s first African-American woman attorney, a teacher at Rogers High School for more than 30 years, a president of the Spokane Education Association and a president of the Washington State University Board of Regents.
She was also a forceful and stalwart leader in the local civil rights movement, which helped drag a recalcitrant Spokane toward equality. She believed in nonviolence, but don’t confuse that with meekness.
Listen to Scott in a 1982 talk: “We must exercise some degree of militancy … against slumlords, against Klansmen, against people who want no minorities in their neighborhoods, against racist textbooks and against politicians who thrive on bigotry. Otherwise, people will say in the future, ‘You were there. What did you do about it?’ ”
She grew up during the 1920s and 1930s, especially tough times for a black person aspiring to be a professional in Spokane.
When Scott was a student at Marycliff High School in the late 1930s, she and some of her high school friends went to the Davenport Hotel to interview the famous opera star Marian Anderson for the school paper.
The Davenport made Scott ride in the freight elevator.
“My white friends – bless their hearts – decided if I had to ride the freight elevator, they would, too,” she later said.
They couldn’t find Anderson’s room – for good reason. Anderson was black and the Davenport was lily-white in those days. The girls eventually found Anderson in a small hotel nearby.
Scott spoke often of the time when, as a girl, she had to have her appendix removed at a Spokane hospital. The hospital gave her a private room – but only so a white patient wouldn’t have to share.
“I suppose that was one of the advantages of being black,” she said, dryly. “But it was humiliating when you realize why I got the room to myself.”
She graduated from Marycliff and went on to Holy Names College. She married W. Vernon Scott, a Spokane chiropractor, while still in college – and that didn’t go over well with the nuns at Holy Names.
“The good nuns put her out because she married a divorced man in her senior year,” said her sister, Ruth Nichols, of Spokane.
Undeterred, Scott finished her degree at Whitworth College (now University) and then went on to get a master’s degree in education. This was 1958 – a time when the Spokane School District had only four black teachers, up from zero in 1950.
She was hired at Rogers because “my credentials were good enough for them to hire me without doing me a favor.” She would teach English and German there for more than three decades.
She was 54 when she decided to take on another academic challenge.
“She wanted her son to go to law school,” Nichols said. “And we all said, if you want a lawyer in the family, you should go yourself.”
So she did. She graduated from the Gonzaga University School of Law in 1979 – and became Spokane’s first African-American woman attorney. When she was sworn in to the bar, she said, “I want to be able to instruct, as well as represent, minority people in their dealings with the law.”
She went on to practice law on the side, taking mostly civil rights and pro bono cases, while still keeping her Rogers teaching job.
Scott soon found her law degree handy in an entirely new arena. In 1981 she was elected president of the teachers union, the Spokane Education Association. Her election was notable for at least one reason: She had been one of the few teachers to cross picket lines in a 1979 strike. She was able to convince her fellow teachers that she had been bound, as an attorney, to obey a court injunction that had ordered teachers back to work. She remained president of the union until 1983.
She was also deeply involved in the Spokane branch of the NAACP, in the Democratic Party and at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church.
Excerpted from Distinguished Woman Left Us a Legacy by Jim Kershner.
