by Anthony Julius Williams
Construction Paper: Jeffrey “Jombi Supastar” Stovall grew up in West Philly, the kind of place where black working class folks swept their front porches on Saturday mornings so it looked nice. His truck driver Dad was none too thrilled when young Jombi announced he wanted to be a sculptor. But Dad was also a self-styled intellectual who took Jombi to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the age of twelve, where a retrospective of the works of Édouard Manet convinced him he wanted to be a painter. His Mom, a nurse, was a bold fashionista who wore Emilio Pucci miniskirts and dyed her hair blonde back in the days when such things raised eyebrows. Says Jombi: When I told her that I was gay, she told me that she always knew, and she said, “I could tell because you used to love my fashion magazines.”
Glitter: Jombi first made a name for himself as a party promoter during the late '80s in Philadelphia, where he was a fixture at the Kennel Club and the Catacombs. He knew a lot of DJs and would scout out places for all night dance parties that didn’t cost too much. Fashion, art and music collided at these outrageous blow-outs: the DJs spun everything from acid house to trip hop, artists painted live while art house flicks were projected on the wall, and strippers, jugglers and fire acts kept things rolling right along. It was one big circus! The crowds were an amazing mix of suits and punks, art school kids and homeless-sexuals. In those days everybody went out of their way not to look like each other; now, everybody looks just alike.
Black Outline: Gangsta rap was beginning to pick up steam in those days, but Jombi preferred hip-hop that sent sane messages. The stuff I hear is usually about who has the biggest cock, who has the most gold, how many girls you got, fuck the next guy – that’s crap! I think that does a disservice to the young kids who listen to music like that. I wonder when some of these kids listen to this music, “Do you think all women are bitches and whores? I mean, like, don’t you have a mom, a sister, a grandmother?” It wasn’t like that when hip-hop was still underground and artists were accountable to local communities – long before it went mainstream and got commercialized.
Nail Polish: Jombi and his then boyfriend went camping with some straight friends at the Rainbow Gathering in Pennsylvania in 1988, where he first encountered some Radical Faeries. The Faeries were interested in expressing themselves artistically, blurring the lines of gender and sexuality, being playful and joyful, and caring for the environment. I didn’t know that people could be like that – gay people particularly, because most queer culture that I’m around is usually very superficial, very materialistic and really vacant.
Red: The Faeries were notorious for processing their feelings. We are all human beings and we are all coming from the same dysfunction, and if you have an idea like “Okay, my shit is kinda messed up, but I’m trying to work it out.” – There’s something to be said for that. They used heart circles and mediation to solve problems in the community. I applaud them! I think they’re really necessary – getting together once a week to talk about issues and things you aspire to and be supportive of each one’s dreams… There’s no panacea, no perfect society; everybody has their baggage – but just the idea of trying to make something opposite to what we have… There’s no models; you have to work from scratch to put it together. Just like an artist staring at blank canvas.
Mermaids: After the gay rights March on Washington in 1993, Jombi checked out the Spring Gathering at the Faerie sanctuary in Short Mountain, Tennessee. I was completely blown away by the experience. People can actually cooperate with each other, and you can get laid, and you can meet somebody that can talk to you about how to grow things, about the politics of the world to food to ramakrishna spirituality or building a house. These were things he was getting from the Faeries that he wasn’t finding in mainstream culture, straight or gay. That same year, he became the first African-American steward of the Short Mountain sanctuary.
White-Out: Then as now, few black people were involved with the Faeries. Jombi attended an integrated high school, so he was never as alienated as other black folk might have been by the scene. (But) there were definitely challenging moments, because – let’s face it – white men collectively think differently than most human beings on Earth. How do you deal with those moments? I think a lot of it has to do with how you feel about yourself and loving yourself. But why would blacks and Others want to subject themselves to difficult if unavoidable discussions about cultural, economic and gender differences? People like me (are) a mirror for many white people; we are a part of this too, not just people of color but women as well… I’m all for any place that is about nurturing and healing and beauty and guilt-free sex and, of course, lots of glamor – I’m all about that!
Layering: Jombi is a streetwise dandy known as much for his recycled fashions as his paintings. Some of my best outfits I picked up off the street. His colorful, eclectic clothes are truly one-of-a-kind because they are found objects – found lying on the sidewalk, to be precise: he washes and presses them, then mends and blends them to create a look that is uniquely his own. As a youth, he obsessed endlessly over the dresses and shoes in his mother’s fashion magazines, but it’s not about labels for Jombi. It’s about having an imagination and a creative eye and what inspires you colorwise. Wear what you feel comfortable in, and keep yourself with care. Fashion, after all, is another way to love who you are.
Hearts and Bones: Jombi confesses that his sexual issues inspire his artwork. There’s an irrepressible eroticism in the free-flowing circles of maypole creatures that seed his work. I feel as though sexuality, creativity and the spirit are very much interconnected. I feel as though sex and art and music is all the same thing. I am enamored by all of that. It inspires me. Green one-eyed monsters are emerging in his latest pencil drawings. That might be me working out my cautious optimism about the future, about what’s happening in this country and in the world, but there’s always that part of me that goes for the sexual angle of things. Monsters and optimism and sex are not such a strange mix for this artist who is very concerned about the environment: I’m thinking of loss of green, so I’m trying to capture things that are alive, that remind me of things that grow or things that come from the earth.
Angels and Dragons: Jombi considers himself spiritual, but not religious. Neither his Dad nor Mom were church-minded during his upbringing, though his mother now attends Baptist services every Sunday. I do have a belief in a higher power; however, I have fundamental issues with organized religion in general, Christianity in particular. For Jombi, spirituality is about treating everyone with respect and consideration. He’s the active, physical sort who finds it hard to sit still for meditation, but Thich Nhat Hahn’s walking meditations appeal to him, and sometimes he walks to the gym or market with mala beads in hand. Ultimately, though, his preferred method of meditation is his art.
Pencil and Acrylic: Jombi has been drawing and painting for more than twenty years. An autodidact, his formal training consists of one drawing class from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He also worked there as an artists’ model, and that experience allowed him to meet many working artists, which he credits with kick-starting his drive to become a serious visual artist. It’s an honorable thing – not everyone wants to work at McDonald’s, be a drug-dealer, be a doctor – some people want to paint pictures or play music or write the best novel… He started with pencil drawings, then switched to oil, then moved on to watercolor, acrylic and tempera. He began experimenting with collage three years ago, starting with cut-outs, and now layered mixed media defines his signature style, though he exhibits pencil drawings as well and plans to build installations – “living sculptures with sound” – in the near future.
Color, Cut-Outs and Cartoons: Édouard Manet’s daring social sketches were the first but not the only inspirations for Jombi’s own work. His painting is clearly indebted to Henri Matisse’s bold joyful colors and Pablo Picasso’s dark masculine experimentations, as well as Jean Dubuffet’s modernist pop doodles. Romare Bearden’s jazzy collages and Kara Walker’s silhouette cut-outs – and both artists’ shared concern with African-American heritage – inform the work. Jean Michel Basquiat’s faux-naïf black scribblings and Keith Haring’s playful sexual cartoons have left their traces as well. Finally, Jombi’s work channels cavewall drawings and dreamtime mandalas, so much so that we can’t say if he is recalling indigenous peoples or they are dreaming him.
Gold: Not surprisingly, Jombi’s artistic process is idiosyncratic. He may be inspired by how an animal or cartoon looks in a book or magazine, then try out a drawing of it – or he may be looking through a dictionary of mythology and play with the images. It takes a long time to do drawings. I sit and just vege out, just go into my own world – it’s like a hallucination. I might think about my family or my mom, who is a very important part of my life. I think about people that I love. Sometimes I come to resolutions if I have a hard feeling about someone or myself. He never enters the process with an agenda, but he does view it as therapeutic. It becomes a healing for me because I work out a lot of hurt feelings. I work out becoming more thoughtful and more compassionate. The process can be surprising. He may draw something unexpected, but if it comes out beautifully, he’ll just play around with it. Some of the more interesting things that happen in life are things that happen by accident.
Clear Coat: He often puts an artwork away, then comes back to it, will see something in it he didn’t see before, and then reworks it. If he gets stuck on a piece – the colors or positioning may not be working out – he will start work on a new piece and ideas will come to him about the old piece. There’s no standard order he follows when layering the various media in his art. It’s like whatever comes to me in the moment – it just takes me over. He wants his work to be colorful, alive, vibrant – and full of movement. I like for people to be drawn into the work, not necessarily that they know or even understand what it is. The final step is a polyurethane coating that makes all the colors pop and turns it into a durable object that will stand the test of time.
Crowns: When I had that one-person show there were people – Jombi mimics his friends talking – “Like I didn’t even know you did anything.” Such comments are not as vapid as they seem if you actually know Jombi: his deep brown eyes, manly tenderness, and raspy laughter make his mere existence blessing enough. But he does indeed do something. He is a griot – an African praise singer – who conjures magical worlds in pencil and paint that return us to that mythical first place where the great goddess strapped on the Tree of Life to inseminate the Edenic Womb, begetting that prehistoric time when our ancestors gave us the everlasting abundance of re-minding us who we really are, long before the great flood of forgetting drowned us in gulfs of war. At moonrise, the stars come out twinkling like double yowas, the stylized symbols of the cosmos drawn by the Congo people living in the heart of Africa, and green monsters come out to play, not unlike the stoned green men that mount the cathedrals of Europe, virile art-i-facts of Christianity’s pagan roots. By sunset, on the smoky shore of hallucination between the mountain of peace and the sea of healing, we Celebrate Our Mother even as – at long last – we Embrace Our Father, remembering that The Children are well-endowed not only physically, but intellectually, creatively and spiritually. One-eyed angels everywhere! The singular eye I think of in terms of the all-seeing eye, the eye that sees beyond the material to the infinite…The angel can see into people and life. Angels have vision… They have a center to be calm enough to think or perceive. Perhaps that is why, though Jombi Supastar is a handsome black man with a youthful spirit, all his self-portraits make him look like an old man, weathered and wise.
Green: Four years ago, Jombi relocated to the Bay Area after meeting his current lover and longtime Berkeley resident, Alwyn “Wyn” de Wally. They share a lovely home filled with art books and abstract paintings and handcrafted furniture and Persian rugs—and a beautifully decorated ancestor altar greets you at the front door. Jombi’s cozy artist studio is tucked away behind curtains in the bedroom, and he stores his work in a friend’s basement closeby. Jombi likes Berkeley because it’s very green, with flowers everywhere. The cost of living is high, but so is the quality of life: Berkeley is a pretty university town where people read books, eat locally-grown sustainably-farmed organic food, and are generally health-conscious. He has a real community of friends here that he sees on a daily basis who share similar ideas. He met many of them through Wyn, but recent events have allowed Jombi to carve out an identity all his own.
Stars: A private exhibition at the spacious home of Antler, a pillar of the Radical Faerie community in the Bay Area, put Jombi Supastar on the map in San Francisco in Fall 2007. That led to Jombi’s legendary solo show at MAGNET, the gorgeous health-clinic-cum-community-center in the heart of the Castro, the world’s most famous gay neighborhood. The room was packed with more people than any previous art showing at MAGNET, and eight Jombi originals were sold that night! Early this year, Jombi went international with a showing of works on paper in mixed mediums that was part of Melbourne's Midsumma festivities. This June, back in California, he and his partner Wyn are showing work they collaborated on as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. Their installation includes three papier-mâché sculptures. So now Jombi has fulfilled his boyhood dream of becoming a sculptor. Jombi Supastar looks back at how far he’s come and laughs slyly: It’s all a hustle, you know.
Anthony Julius Williams is a multimedia artist based in San Francisco, CA. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. from the Arts and Consciousness Department at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA.
[To see more of Jombi's art go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supastarartwork/]
