"One-two-three Bulldogs! Four-five-six Family!"
Cindy Weisbart | United States
Photographer: Cindy Weisbart
Exhibit Title: "One-two-three Bulldogs! Four-five-six Family!"
Location: United States
This exhibit documents an NJCAA Division III men’s basketball team, Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College Bulldogs, through their 2019 winning season. Coach Nkrumah Jones made a pivot in his career, where he left successful work in finance and returned to his passion for work with young people. The college setting is where Jones stages young men for independence through interdependence, self-reliance through being reliable to others, power through emotion and joy, and play as a route to resilience.
Jones is a fierce and brilliant coach who attends to details of skills and conditioning - on the court and in the world - of all the young men of color who are players in his gym. He telegraphs a message that is both personal and political, as James Baldwin wrote to his nephew: "if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived."
During a championship season, this project documents a team of young men working and winning, expressing themselves fully and together, and being loved into survival. Jones teaches them all of the rules.
"Four-five-six Family!"
Nkrumah Jones coaches a nationally ranked NJCAA (Junior College) Division III men’s basketball team, Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College Bulldogs. He graduated from Bunker Hill, had a successful career in finance, and left it to return to his passion: mentoring young people through education and basketball. We are friends who teach together at a nearby public high school. He invited me to visit his team many times.
In his gym, I discovered the protected space Jones creates for a group of young men of color to fully be themselves - practicing, vulnerable, happy, growing, learning, playful, angry, frustrated, exuberant. Coach and players share humor, passion, mutual understanding and interdependence. His mentorship is multi-layered: demanding, nurturing, politically astute. During the season, I photographed them three times a week.
James Baldwin wrote, “That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it ...achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.”
My photographs contribute to a visual representation of Black men achieving their own unshakeable authority in context of the racial fire.
cindyweisbart.photography@gmail.com
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