Following up with another collaboration with the University of Hip Hop’s alum comes Lavie Raven’s protege, Zebadiah Arrington. Zeb’s a bit of a graffiti wizard and also a bit of a rascal. Jim Duignan introduced him to Beth Wiedner and I when he was maybe fifteen when we were working on “Musical Chairs”. Even in his youth, he was teaching graffiti workshops at the Hyde Park Art Center when we were running sound tests for the chairs in early 2008, and it always amused me to see him stressing good penmanship as one of the foundations of writing in spray paint. It’s a tricky medium!
We displayed his large-format self-portrait he took while painting atop some billboard overlooking our fine city. Nice big print, nice rich colors. Between the classes we held in tandem, and his graffiti lesson plan that was in our “Musical Chairs” curriculum workbook, he was a perfect fit for our nascent audio/art installation. Once again, the fine folks at Freedman Seating provided us with the prison bus seat canvas where Zeb painted a transliteration of the word “Two” in Arabic to fit the theme of the second set of Musical Chairs. We did over a dozen installs of Zeb’s set from 2008 onward, culminating at the last official showing at Nomadic Studio. It also made it into Artadia’s “5 Cities, 41 Artists” book of exceptional work as part of Stockyard Institute’s programming.
