Check out the YouTube video of Johnny Coleman describing his work and the influence behind his latest piece "Songs from My Mother's Sky" exhibited January 20 – April 1, 2007 at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JLb4Q5YB2I
A masterful storyteller and poet, Johnny Coleman creates site-specific multi-sensory environments. This installation is a part of a personal, ongoing series of works in memory of the artist’s mother, Florence McCoy. Following her passing in 2003, Coleman began constructing physical spaces that sought to simultaneously reflect something of her spirit, and to function as a “prayer.” Within each of the prayers, the presence of birds has been central. Coleman writes, “For my mother, and for myself, birds are evocative of a kind of freedom that is chosen and actively pursued. Birds are music. Flight.”
