What's Up?
"Studio, sanctuary, temple... a magical refuge for channeling creativity"
My main studio is in the attic of an old house ....I have everything and its mother up there. Sometimes the studio is the back yard where I can create in natural light and nature. Other times the studio is where I'm artist in residence which is always a magical experience.
Life & Work
Bio:
"The art I create fulfills a powerful desire to express visually what's not easily spoken, a passion for color, a love of symbols, and a deep interest in matters of the Spirit. Gifts of my ancestors, angels, and spirit guides celebrating the power of art beyond visual image flows through me as a celebration of survival. Ancestral roots real and imagined offer a base to channel elements of healing and blessings."
Harlem native Adriene Cruz was deeply inspired by her mothers creative use of color and the rich cultural influences of her childhood community.
Adriene attended the High School of Art and Design and received a BFA from the School of Visual Art in NewYork.
After relocating to Portland, Oregon she explored quilting at the Oregon School of Art and Craft. What emerged were brilliantly colored and adorned quilts, large and small, piecing together richly patterned materials in rhythmic arrangements, structured as well as improvisational, deeply moving on a spiritual level and simply enjoyable for their sheer beauty.
Fabric, cowrie shells, mirrors, sequins, beads , tribal silver, even beetle wings and fragrant herbs are among the endless adornments and amulets in Adriene's artistic alchemy.
Adriene's creative vision garnered invitations to create public art in her Portland community. Often engaging community youth, Adriene created street banners, murals, decorative trash bins and a billboard. Public artist Valerie Otani invited Adriene to design one of Portland's Light Rail stations. The artists collaborated creating colorful glass mosaic, handmade tiles, steel railings and concrete benches reflecting Ashanti culture. "Stone quilts" embedded in the paving also adorn the platform of Killingsworth Station..
Adriene has exhibted internationally in Brazil, Costa Rica and South Africa. Nationally her work has exhibited at the Smithsonian in D.C., The Folk Art Museum, NY, American Craft Museum , NY, Museum of Biblical Art, NY, The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, and the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA. to name a few. Collections include the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, Hartsfield International Airport, Atlanta GA, Haborview Medical Center, Seattle, Portland Community College and numerous private collections.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).