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Language Arts
Words by Laith Agha
Photos by Kelsey Wisdom
Video by Grant Kinsey
There was always a great painter in Halim Flowers. It just took nearly four decades for it to blossom.
The Washington, D.C. artist, whose work is currently featured in the Monica Graham Fine Art gallery in downtown Carmel, has garnered comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and other legendary expressionist painters during his meteoric rise in the art world.
As extraordinary as his art is his backstory: the 43-year-old began painting just four years ago—about a year after the criminal justice system determined he had been wrongly convicted as an accomplice to murder at the age of 16. After 22 years served, the rest of his two life sentences were commuted. Flowers’ intersection with the criminal justice system is well-documented, including in the 1998 HBO documentary, “Thug Life in D.C.” Ironically, being associated with such a title couldn’t be any less befitting for Flowers, an intellectual who exudes a Zen-like calm.
While in prison, Flowers focused much of his energy on learning about the outside world through the Wall Street Journal, and honing his writing as an author and a poet. (To date, he’s published 12 books, including a memoir “Makings of a Menace, Contrition of a Man”.) Now, he is a rising star in the art world, having sold millions of dollars of his work while being featured in galleries around the globe, from California to New York, Paris, and Dubai.
An example of the frenzy around his art: Graham hosted an event for Flowers at her gallery in March. More than 100 people attended and, within a week, the gallery sold 12 of Flowers’ paintings.
“I’ve never experienced anything like that,” Graham said of the demand for Flowers’ paintings. “It’s something that I didn’t know if Carmel would embrace, because it’s a little more edgy. But everybody loved the art, loved Halim, loved his story.”
Flowers recently sat down with Concept Carmel to discuss his life journey, his art, and how the world changed while he was incarcerated.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You had never painted before the Covid-19 pandemic started. How did you get into it, and how did you get discovered?
My wife taught me. I didn’t know anything about painting. I still don’t know the words to a lot of secondary, non-primary colors. I just learned taupe, for instance.
I had my studio in Georgetown at that time, and I had a fellowship for spoken word. I had my books there, and I would write poetry on these pictures out of the Wall Street Journal, and at every city where I would go to do spoken-word performances, I would get local newspapers, take a picture of them, get them printed out, and write the poetry on them.
So, Covid came, I started painting. My wife and I walked into this gallery in D.C. [in Fall 2020], talked to the lady who’s the director of the gallery, she visited my studio a few weeks later. She saw something in me, because she left, and then 20 minutes later she called me and told me that the owner of the gallery wanted to fly in and meet me. I didn’t know at the time they had never represented a black artist before. Other than Basquiat, they had never featured a black artist in their studio.
From there, it’s been all home runs.
How do you describe your style?
I didn’t really feel it would be adequate to describe my work with pre-manufactured western terminologies. And so, I allowed it to come to me organically, and so I describe my work as “optical improvisation.” Giving the non-material eyes the opportunity to see beyond the confines that the brain conditions the physical eyes to see through the constructs of race, class, gender, creed, sexuality, ageism, disabilities—all these different filters that we’ve manufactured to see ourselves and one another. And so my art gives the viewer an opportunity to improvise beyond the confines and to see with the heart.
You incorporate a lot of words into your artwork. What is the power of the word in your painting?
Growing up when I did, being born in 1980, I always say that hip hop was my sibling. I grew up with an introduction of this genre of music that was composed with words, and it was telling our story of inner-city America. While my grandfather was listening to Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, I’m listening to KRS-One, Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J. I developed this deep passion with words, and I started freestyle rapping, and then when I went to prison when I was 16, I started rapping my own rap songs, and letter writing, and then I got into poetry. That’s when I started publishing my creativity. So, when I shifted to visual art, my intention in March 2020 [when Flowers first began painting] was just to paint poetry. I never sketched or drew. I don’t have any—not only formal training—I didn’t have any informal practice of sketching and expressing myself this way.
So, if someone asked you to paint a portrait or a landscape, perhaps that wouldn’t be your forte?
I would paint what the portrait or landscape feels like, not what it looks like. If someone wants art that is an exact representation of what we call the real world, three-dimensional experience, I believe everyone has access to cameras on their phones. Not to take away from the skill. But for me, I make art to connect with people how they feel.
From growing up in Washington, D.C., to going to prison, to now you get to explore the world as a renowned artist. Those are three entirely different chapters of your life.
One journey is as a child. You literally don’t have any authority or your own humanity. So, I look at the first 16 years of my life as a very unique experience of growing up in a major inner city that was homogenous—Black. With that, I didn’t grow up with a lot of diversity. I was limited to what my guardians could provide. We would take trips to visit family in the South, but my lived experience was very limited.
When I started to learn things in prison when I was an adult, I was like, “Why’d they never teach me about the Federal Reserve and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund? I’d rather learn about that than the Pentagon, the White House, and the Capitol Building. I was like, ‘Why didn’t parents teach me this?’ And then I had to realize that my parents were born during Segregation—Jim Crow. My grandparents went through Jim Crow and the Great Depression. So, that type of institutional awareness that I’ve had the privilege now of being privy to, it wasn’t even realistic for them to research or learn about. They couldn’t even get in the door. So, just looking at my adult life, I understand how uniquely situated I am.
And so, my adult life in prison was really about going back to what I loved as a child, which was learning. The beauty of receiving a life sentence was that everybody pretty much abandoned me. I didn’t really have anyone to impress anymore. So, I could just be myself and work myself out of this situation.
When we reach adolescence, we stop being ourselves. And if you get stuck in that as an adult, I can assume that’s worse than being in a physical prison, because you’re just not happy. So, my adult life has really been about being the nerd that I’ve always been, getting an endorphin release from encountering what I don’t know more than what I do know, and just playing with my imagination in a creative way and building an economy around it. Being able to have these things that I create that go to Dubai, and Paris, and Carmel, and Los Angeles, New York, Palm Beach. I’ve been to castles and chateaus—places I never would have been if it weren’t for my imagination and my audacity to be myself.
When you re-entered society after 22 years, in what ways was the world the same, and in what ways was it different?
It was entirely different. I left in 1997. I remember I met a young lady in 1996, about two months before I went in, and she was like, you want to go to my house and get on the internet? I was like, ‘What is that?’ So, coming home in 2019… Laptops and iPads and iPods and iPhones, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn. I remember when I first got out, my mom had an event for me. I was selling my books there, because I needed cash, and people were asking me, ‘Do you have the Cash app?’ I’m like, ‘What’s that?’ All those things were so new in experiencing them, instead of just reading about them in the Wall Street Journal.
Also, the urban development. In D.C., definitely the infrastructure had improved. And there were charter schools. All the pronouns and genders. To me, things just seemed so much better and easier. I always tell people it’s so much easier to make it out here now. You have the internet. You can reach anybody in the world.
Style-wise, the first artists that come to my novice mind are Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso. Who are the biggest influences on your work?
If you really do a deep dive on visual art, it's the first language before these written languages. The hieroglyphs, the cave paintings in France, if you look at that stuff, you will see the similarities in that art and my art. Contemporarily, the references we have in popular culture, if you have a non-figurative style of art and you accompany that with written language, and you’re Black, the first thing that comes to mind is Basquiat. And then with cues and the shapes, Picasso. With the figures, Keith Haring.
I probably never would’ve gotten into visual art if it had not been for Basquiat, so definitely initially. But four years in now, you start to see this is a whole family of creatives, starting from those who were putting it down on the rocks in the caves.
But the living artist whose work has influenced me the most is George Condo. That’s the artist who I really study. His lines, his colors, his noses, his teeth, his eyes. He just doesn’t use text like I do. But my iconography? Condo. And then, my intent to eventually go into pure abstraction is Mark Bradford. My newfound love for colors is Cecily Brown.
What is your connection to Carmel? How did you end up being featured in a gallery here?
One of my collectors and friends introduced me to Monica [Graham]. She said she had a friend who has a gallery, and ‘I think she’d like to meet you and show your work.’ I didn’t have any gallery representation on the west coast. So, I came here, I fell in love with the town, the energy. I love Monica and her family. And I just wanted to work with her.
I like to work with women, because women are undervalued, overlooked, mistreated, but when they believe in you—like how my mom believed in me—they’re willing to put something much greater into you than just money.
What is it about the energy of Carmel that jibes with you?
I like beach towns. I have a beach house on the east coast, in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland. Something about the people, the energy, the ocean, the saltwater, it just makes me feel like I’m in an ’80s movie, like “The Goonies” or something. Ta-nehisi Coates, the famous author, with his book “Between the World and Me”—I grew up feeling like that. I would watch “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” I would watch “Wonder Years,” I would watch “Small Wonder”—I would watch all these shows with kids, and it was like they’re in a whole different world. What would that be like to grow up in a world where I don’t have to fight? Where I can go swimming and I don’t have to worry about someone stealing my tennis shoes?
So, when I came here and similar places in America, and throughout the world, it’s that euphoria for that world in between that Ta-nehisi Coates spoke about, that proverbial America, that I’ve always just yearned to be.
You have a family of your own now, yeah?
I’m married, going on five years now. We have a 3-year-old daughter, who will be 4 in July. Toddlers are terrorists, just so you know.
It’s a dichotomous experience: the most trying but the most satisfying experience I’ve ever had. And to see yourself in the feminine form as a man—my daughter looks a lot like me, acts like how I acted… Being a father is a phenomenal experience. Being married is a phenomenal experience.
You mentioned that you grew up following sports like baseball, football, and basketball. Are you still a fan?
I used to be a sports junkie—stats everything. Now I’m just about the art world. Following the auctions—Philips, Christie’s, Sotheby’s. Studying the market, living artists, dead artists. Who are the curators, the assistant curators, the directors of museums. That’s my whole life.
I was painting during the Super Bowl—I caught overtime. I think Taylor Swift won. <img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6457f19f1c1e1601e2c9c3f6/6487a9355b63a6818c705cea_CC-Icon--20.svg"alt="CC" style="display: inline-block; max-width: 100%; min-width: 20px; width: 20px; height: 20px;">
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Laith Agha holds a Masters in Journalism from UC Berkeley. He was a news reporter at the Monterey County Herald and Marin Independent Journal and managing editor of the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants' stadium magazines, published by Diablo Publishing.