Mingus Drawing

Home People Perspectives Interview Calendar Video Art, Black Culture, Books, Chicago, Interview, On November 13, 2019 Chicago’s Author And Artist John Sibley by David Smallwood Prolific artist and author John Sibley John Sibley is an author of eight books and an artist with over 100 paintings to his credit who counts Walter Payton, Mayor Richard Daley, Mike Tyson, basketball player John Salley and the South Side Community Art Center as some of the collectors of his artwork. Sibley’s first book, Bodyslick, is a sci-fi novel about harvesting body parts in the Black community, among other things. His latest tome is called Riding The A-Train With Einstein. Sibley is also a Vietnam vet, an advocate for the homeless, and a bit of a Renaissance man. We chatted recently with John about his life and work. N’DIGO: Background, please. John Sibley: I grew up on Chicago’s West Side, South Side, and in Robbins, Illinois. Graduated from Eisenhower High School and was raised in a blue-collar household. My father was a factory foreman and my mother a classic 1950s housewife. We lived in the LeClaire Courts projects on the Southwest Side. My father played boogie-woogie on his Grand Steinway piano and was offered a gig with the Count Basie band, but he opted to marry my mother and raise a family. We moved to Robbins because it was close to his job. He was a foreman at a plastics company. The poverty I saw in those Black West and Southside communities shaped and molded how I looked at the world. I started to view Black communities with a more political consciousness. I started to view them as if they were colonies. I moved to Aurora later in life because of a job opportunity – I worked 27 years in the private sector as a supervisor for an acoustic company. It was not a creative job, but nuts and bolts. My hands were like sandpaper. There is honor in work. Only in recent modern history have we become specialists. In prior centuries, an artist could do a lot more than paint. They were architects, alchemists, engineers, and scientists. All of my life accomplishments in art and writing are a product of the diversity of my life. Every job I have had. Every encounter with death. The pain of being homeless in the world. All of it contributed to my evolution as an artist and author. Sibley’s Jordan and “Sweetness” paintings. Are you equal parts author and artist, or what would you say the ratio is? I would say 40/60 as an artist.