By Dave Alexander
MUSKEGON — As an artist, Kadir Nelson said he looks for beauty in negative situations.
Such a philosophy created a Negro League Baseball book that is the subject of a new exhibit at theMuskegon Museum of Art. It also describes Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights workers, the soft-spoken artist said Friday.
“Dr. King and the civil rights workers transformed something that was negative into something that was beautiful,” Nelson told The Chronicle after speaking to the Urban League of Greater Muskegon’s MLK Unity Breakfast at Muskegon Community College.
“That is the same mantra I have taken in regards to my work,” said the author of “We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball.” “I take negative situations and turn them into something beautiful.”
The beauty of Nelson’s 41 paintings depicting the history of Negro league baseball were unveiled Thursday evening at the exhibit opening at the museum.
He told the more than 300 gathered of how the paintings were created from 2000 to 2007. The book and art exhibit depict a time when African American baseball players could not play for major league teams because of the historic Jim Crow laws of forced segregation.
Nelson is an accomplished artist and illustrator who has worked on children’s books along with books by Debbie Allen and Spike Lee.
His most recent work is on two book projects, one on boxer Joe Lewis and the other on African American history. Nelson has an “album cover” illustration of the late pop icon Michael Jackson on the singer’s latest release.
Kadir NelsonNelson described the research and detail that goes into each one of his paintings. There is no detail left unattended, indicating how a serious baseball fan can find “issues” in his work.
Nelson said that after his original Negro league baseball illustrations were published in Sports Illustrated, comedian/actor Billy Crystal contacted him to commission illustrations of his beloved New York Yankees and hall-of-famer Mickey Mantle.
When the artist showed Crystal some initial sketches, the project ground to a halt. Nelson said he had the home team in the wrong dugout in Yankee Stadium.
“You’d of thought that I had slapped his mother,” Nelson said of losing the job.
The art does not copy known photographs but is his own original recreation of the league’s history, Nelson said. They are images of people showing “the human spirit,” he said of his artwork.
“We Are the Ship” is told in nine “innings” or chapters in which Nelson’s illustrations are accompanied by his own “creative essays,” providing readers a first-person story of the leagues.
The book reviews the history of the Negro leagues from the 1920 founding by team owner Rube Foster to the breaking of Major League Baseball’s racial barrier by Jackie Robinson in 1947.
The “We Are the Ship” exhibit is at the Muskegon Museum of Art through March 13. It is the only Michigan showing of Nelson’s Negro league.