Explorations in Black Leadership

Co-Directed by Phyllis Leffler & Julian Bond

The Artist as Leader

BOND: How is an artist a leader?

DOVE: An artist touches and articulates the depths of our emotions. It's all the stuff that we don't talk about and that we only admit to our — Sometimes we don't even admit it to ourselves. We don't even realize it, so the artist is really responsible for articulating the spirit of the tribe, if we want to go back to that point. In that sense, you could almost say that the artist is one of the leaders of our spiritual lives, emotional lives, not in the sense of prescribing where you should go, but in the sense of reminding you who you are in all of your complex glory as a human being, so an artist is really truly a leader.