Ryan Brooke Taylor,
New York City, NY.
Collected from: WITNESS: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties at The Brooklyn Museum
My experience as a black male artist is directly related to the sacrifices and gains made by those who participated, in any and every way in the civil rights movement. They have made me free.
I’m simply a Black male Actor carving out my life in America.
I believe that who I am as a person; my integrity, my ethics, my humanity, these aspects of self are reflected in Everything I do.
Right now I have the honor of being in a wonderful production of Tracey Letts’s “Superior Donuts”. A play about race, class, and the american dream as played out in the gentrifying neighborhood of north- side Chicago.
To me, living a conscious life today is a revolutionary act. My existence as a Black, Gay, working Artist is in itself a Politic. It’s seems to me that the important questions are: What kind of neighbor am I? What hind of partner am I? What kind of citizen am I? What kind of artist am I? What kind of human being am I?
And the answers lie not in what I think and even less in what I say, but in what I do.
