A close-up of musician Nina Simone is captured in blue, black, gray and white acrylic paint. Her face is surrounded by a large black letter “N.” Etched into the glass frame is “WORD.”
Artist Michael Stevenson created this piece for his 2015 exhibition “Civil Rights Civil Wrongs” at University of Texas. Personal experiences were the inspiration.
“My nephews were throwing the N word around very casually,” says Stevenson, a graphic designer raised in Nashville. “It’s a hip thing to do, but once you’re starting to have kids, you think about the history of the word and how hurtful and demeaning it is. So, I took on the N word. Nina Simone fought so hard to eliminate this word. Now my N word is Nina.”
Stevenson had early exposure to Black artists, thanks to a childhood at Fisk University, an historically Black college where his father worked. He was inspired by Harlem Renaissance icon Aaron Douglas and the crosshatching style of Charles White.
Majoring in art, Stevenson realized he needed a “broader idea of what I wanted to do after college.” This led to a bachelor’s degree in design from UC Davis.
After working in retail with dreams of fashion design, Stevenson grew tired of industry politics. He shifted to graphic design. As a production artist at Sacramento Savings and Loan, he met photographer Aniko Kiezel. When she left to work in Los Angeles, Stevenson tried his luck in New York.
“I didn’t want to wake up at 35 and say I should have gone to New York when I was 25,” he says. “If you want to go to New York, you’ve got to go with a strong appetite.”
From 1982 to 1987, Stevenson lived in Harlem and Brooklyn, and pursued a master’s degree in graphic design at Pratt Institute. He got married but missed California. The couple moved to Palo Alto, where Stevenson worked in advertising and opened a design firm.
Back in Sacramento, Stevenson and his photographer friend Kiezel reunited, sharing a studio at Two Rivers Cider. Kiezel shoots for Inside Sacramento.
Throughout his 30-year design career, Stevenson has exhibited artwork at Sacramento State, Pence Gallery in Davis and University of Texas. Though his work maintains a through-line of drawing, he experiments with different mediums—even trash.
“We use toilet paper from this company called Give a Crap that has really graphic wrappers,” Stevenson says. “I was taking the trash out and thought, I can do something with this. So I saved the wrappers and started experimenting with collage based on Romare Bearden.”
The pieces were featured in the Black AF Art Auction curated by Faith J. McKinnie in May at the Black Artist Foundry. One piece, “Olivia,” is a riff on Édouard Manet’s “Olympia,” one of the earlier paintings to feature a Black person.
“I’m fortunate that because I’m African American, there’s a rich history there,” Stevenson says. “A lot of times it doesn’t get out there, and if it does, it’s slanted. If it’s going to be slanted, I want to slant it toward the way I think.”
Stevenson’s artistic intentions aren’t exclusively about race.
“I’m not just trying to teach people who don’t have my background, but also who aren’t my age,” he says. “There are lots of things I’ve seen and done because of my age. I wish that young people, rather than waiting to get to my age, see something I’ve done and think, maybe I can look at it a different way.”
For information, find Stevenson on Instagram @mstevenson3.
Jessica Laskey can be reached at jessrlaskey@gmail.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
