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featuring the work of Tom Feelings

Profile on Tom Feelings

"When I am asked who I am, I say, I am an African who was born in America. Both answers connect me specifically with my past and present ... therefore I bring to my art a quality which is rooted in the culture of Africa ... and expanded by the experience of being in America. I use the vehicle of 'fine art' and 'illustration' as a viable expression of form, yet striving always to do this from an African perspective, an African world view, and above all to tell the African story ... this is my content. The struggle to create artwork as well as to live creatively under any conditions and survive (like my ancestors), embodies my particular heritage in America." 
     
Tom Feelings             

The Middle Passage

From the Introduction

'Nowhere in the annals of history has a people experienced such a long and traumatic ordeal as Africans during the Atlantic slave trade. Over the nearly four centuries of the slave - which continued until the end of the Civil War - millions of African men, women, and children were savagely torn from their homeland, herded onto ships, and dispersed all over the so-called New World. Although there is no way to compute exactly how many people perished, it has been estimated that between thirty and sixty million Africans were subjected to this horrendous triangular trade system and that only one third-if that-of those people survived...'     

DR. JOHN HENRICK CLARKE


NCA, Friends & Family of Tom Feelings
will celebrate his life and legacy with a 2-day memorial, Friday, February 27 and 28, 2004. Our dear brother, master illustrator, sculptor and very popular nice guy, made his transition on August 25 after recently learning that he had cancer. Family and friends joined him in his fight of this dreaded disease, and held a 70th birthday party for him on May 18 (the day before his birthday) in his longtime community of Brooklyn, NY. He had never had a birthday party prior to this, and wanted to celebrate with his friends, not knowing how bad the condition was.

Friends started a fundraising drive to send him to a facility in Germany that specialized in cancer patients, but he became too weak to travel and was hospitalized in South Carolina until he got strong enough to travel. Tom traveled to a similar facility in Mexico, but the cancer had spread too far, and time was not on his side.

The first memorial tribute will take place at Medgar Evers College, Founder’s Auditorium, 1650 Bedford Avenue, followed the next day with a memorial service and salute at Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood’s St. Paul’s Baptist Church, 859 Hendrix St., both located in his beloved Brooklyn. A partial list of invited guests include, Maya Angelou, Roberta Flack, Amiri Baraka, Jim Barnes, Elombe Brath, Ernie Crichlow, Errol Doris, Cy Edwards, Paul Goodnight, Rev. Marshall Hatch, Eli Kince, Sylvia Huen, Abbey Lincoln, George Edward Tait, Quincy Troupe, Randy Weston, Camille Yarbrough, The Putnam Avenue Group, Imani Dancers, Drummers and Singers and the St. Paul’s Praise Ministry of dancers, drummers and singers.

Many of Tom’s lifelong friends, and some new ones have pitched in to form a committee and production team “NCA, Family & Friends of Tom Feelings”. headed by Co-chairs, Kwame Brathwaite, NCA president  and Dr. Brenda Greene,  Director of The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College.

Committee members and friends, Richard Barclift, Gloria C. Thomas, Gertrude Harvey, Khaliyah Washington-Seely, Gwendolyn Wilson, Frank Edwards, Lillian Harvey,
Lafayette Robinson, Grant Spears, Surya Peterson, Izell Glover, Jimmie Mannas, Emmett Wigglesworth, Kitty Chavis, Betty Thomas, Abdul Aziz, Miriam Francis, Brenda Mattingly, Otto Neals, Pat Cummings, Joan Banks and Matthew Meade, have put together a program that includes friends from all over the U.S. This tribute is endorsed by Kamili Feelings, Tom’s youngest son and executor of his estate.

Contacts are still being made to locate other key friends of Feelings. For further information, contact Kwame Brathwaite at (212) 410-7892 or ncanewyork@aol.com.


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