About me
A Virginia native, I came to Oakland, CA, by way of Norfolk, Atlanta, New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco. I was born into a family of activist artists and university professors. After becoming one of the first Black graduates of the elite Westminster Schools in Atlanta, I pioneered and completed a new degree of my own design in Visual Arts at Princeton, becoming one of its first photography graduates.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, I exhibited as a member of the City Without Walls artists' collective in Newark. Later I developed and ran the jurying system used for making grants directly to visual artists by the National Endowment for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts, and the NY Foundation for the Arts. In the SF/East Bay Area I joined boards for the Julia Morgan Arts Center and 2AES/CCA, the Center for Critical Architecture. Currently I run Ryder Foto and am on the Board of Directors for Oakland Art Murmur and the East Bay Photo Collective.
