Day With(out) Art - Reflections: Frederick Weston

The Folk Art Museum sponsors an annual Visual AIDS artist talk and presentation for Day With(out) Art to the students of La Guardia High School writing class; after returning to La Guardia, the students draw on this experience to create their own poetry book.

A self-described "African-American man living an alternative lifestyle," Weston ultimately left the Midwest behind to seek out the bright lights in Manhattan, where he says he's "spent all his adult life working and playing." He went to school and entered the working world, but only to pay the bills: Art has always called to him, no matter what else he may have been doing. "I have never 'found' the time to do my art," he says. "I 'make' the time. I 'take' the time." It's the idea of his "blackness" that resonates most profoundly throughout his work, Weston says. "The one thing I have never been able to get around is being black and male in this world," he says. "It colors my every dream."