MLK Memorial Commemoration Ceremony, Topology, Poetry

King's 1963 Speech:

I Have a Dream 

Excerpt: on Boys and Girls of All Color

     Having been postponed by the Biblical Hosts of Earthquake and Hurricane Irene's wrath a few month ago - The Martin Luther King Memorial Commemoration was held this sunny morning in Washington D.C. Among others including the President a throng of rainbow- hued onlookers and his elegantly coutured wife Michelle Obama.

      Also Aretha Franklin sang or rather sculpted a song from wispy air and the rich clay of her deep soul - the very song she had been asked to sing to him on that fateful of his assassination.

     Growing up in a wonderfully diverse and racially mixed family I was reminded of the struggles of the day and renewed the commitment for  those still before us in pursuit of that day - to paraphrase King : when ' the content of character not the color of one's skin'...'that day when children black and whites girls could walk side by side without recriminations... '
     The influence of Doctor King's poetry echoes through my work, a certain moral and aesthetic set of imperatives. Call them weapons of choice when attacking the blank canvas...along Gauguin's queries in his last painting D'oA: Where do we come from? Where are we ? Where are we going?  

      My parents did so in unpopular times some fifty years ago in Queens  New York. He as a very promising young scientist and exile bound for Columbia University as a Histology professor during the turbulent sixties she an aspiring opera singer. He an exile from the Duvalier regime she a young beauty from Montreal during  the late fifties.

Young Lovers (Harlem Suite) - Oil on canvas

Peter G Pereira 1999/2000

     Early I sought and struggled to develop an artistic metric that would transcend color, shape, size, and creed by being able to be inclusive of all of the above.     

Across Time and Spaces

Mixed-Media Collage

Peter G Pereira 1984

          Through the shallow depths I was traversing then and deeper oceans of thought and feeling I was to submerge and to navigate later an aesthetic prevailed born in the language and spiritual currency of Martin Luther King whose words where as alive then as they are now. I have a dream.

   

Twain Self-Portrait

Peter G Pereira 2009