Juneteenth

A happy Juneteenth to all my African-American friends. While I’m enjoying my day off and using it to catch some rest, many in the United States who are incarcerated are forced to perform essentially slave labor for the cancerous for-profit prison industrial complex. For more background on this. The Punishment Clause is a threat to the rights of all citizens of this country, so I’m taking this holiday as an opportunity to remember that.

I did also catch some live music today, a zydeco show that I took my daughter to. Just another nice reminder of the beautiful diversity of our city and country, as Creole culture was on prominent display. There are a lot of good shows coming up that I hope to see with my daughter this year; the Juneteenth one on Saturday should be fun.

I started rereading The Artist’s Guide, which is a pretty pragmatic approach to just achieving your goals as an artist. I have a lot of work still to do outside of just creating pieces. I had started reading it and planning this website as a pandemic project back in the Spring of 2020, and life since then has been much more hectic than it ever was before the pandemic, so it’s been challenging to stay with it. I’d recommend the book if you’re trying to become a professional artist. I wouldn’t mind following in my mother’s footsteps in some ways. Speaking of which, I hope to launch a second website in the coming years to display and sell prints of my mother’s art. Let me know if you’re at all interested in that, because it will take a lot of work.

6/19/25

-PGB