VERNELL GARRETT • Artist / Wordsmith
He was born in Chicago and raised in a neighborhood where the wrong word to the wrong person might cost your life. It was a district deemed the most dangerous place in the nation, and those who resided there were given only a two percent chance of emerging from it. Reared in a single parent household with eight other siblings (each uniquely and artistically talented) he survived through unassailable familial love and an inherited fanciful escapism. His mother didn’t discourage his abilities as idealistic oddities but fostered them with an encouragement that he could be anything he willed to be.
By expressing from an ever evolving self, he hopes to produce a career of work that informs and invigorates while it progressively challenges limitations. His work and life are dedicated to the education, proliferation and dispensation of produce that serve as an antidote to the reductive default of status quo ideology and demagoguery. His current style echoes the past works of Robert Rauschenberg, Romare Bearden and Franz Kline, but one shouldn’t assume that what they see now is what they always will.
The task of every human is to mature as a unified mind, body and spirit with the source of all creation as our guide. Life requires that we create something in which we are totally reflected, but artists can produce spiritual, universal and meaningful expressions for others. With innovation and imagination, we can search the frontiers of our soul for the good of the commonwealth. The external passions and expressions we manifest permit us to speak across generations, cultures and political affiliations. Blessed with an inner-vision, Vernell Garrett's mandate is to elaborate on the human victories and subhuman scandals that form or deform our ambition for a more perfect human union.
