Change of Art This fall will undoubtedly look different in many ways, but there are still opportunities to experience and appreciate the arts in our community. Here are just a few:
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A Q&A with Keith Knight, the Carrboro-based cartoonist whose life inspired a Hulu television series By H an n ah Le e | P h otography by Cornel l Wat son
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. eith Knight lived in San Francisco for 16 years as a cartoonist
working for publications from the SF Weekly to the Salt Lake City Weekly. He eventually moved to Los Angeles for eight years to try to develop “something” for television. But it wasn’t until he settled in Chapel Hill in 2015 (he moved to Carrboro a year later) with his wife, Kerstin Konietzka-Knight, and sons, Jasper, 12, and Julian, 7, that Hollywood came calling. Hulu signed a deal for his show “Woke” in late 2016; it depicts his life as an award-winning cartoonist who focuses on social activism, racial illiteracy and police brutality, which he personally experienced early on after the San Francisco police mistook him as a robbery suspect. All episodes debut on Sept. 9. How did you first get into cartooning? It’s something that I always
did even as a kid, and I think everybody does that, but I was constantly encouraged. I remember in kindergarten drawing dinosaurs, and the teacher holding it up and showing everybody and getting all excited about it. I was always encouraged to create. 20
By the time I got to seventh grade and the [special arts] program [I was in from fourth to sixth grade] was over, I was creating comic books. I was creating zines. That’s when I first started doing autobiographical stuff. I started to incorporate it into my schoolwork, and that worked well with everything except math. It’s like, two plus two is four, and you can’t really deviate from that no matter how much you draw on the paper. So I started doing [a comic strip] for my junior high newsletter, [and then] my high school newspaper. Then I got into college, and that’s where my first strip I still do now started. And it really changed in college when I had my first Black teacher, which was a huge thing. I had him for American literature, and he gave us Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin to read. And when someone asked, “Why are you giving us all Black writers in American literature?” he said, “I’m giving you all American writers.” That totally blew my mind. It was the first time in school reading about the Black experience outside of a paragraph or two about slavery. And so it