S.K. Duff

My own work follows suit – always emotional, full of my person – in short, it is the evidence of my path.

…As I once flippantly told a reporter “Livin’ ain’t no hobby, and I ain’t no tole painting.” I have always been fascinated by “the other” — the outsider — specifically those who exist outside my own realm of experience. Growing up in Oklahoma, the native-American Pow-Wow was my first exposure to the grandeur of “the other.” As a teenager, this fascination expanded with my choosing to “cross the tracks” and attend the countries’ first voluntarily integrated high school, Booker T. Washington.

My own history and fascination with Native and African American cultures has lead me to collect ethnographic art from around the world; and this obsession has taken me to places like Bali and Mexico. Bali is a magical place where the act of making objects is revered as a divine act (a way to worship in a sense). Everyone in Bali makes something whether it is paintings or sculptures, or daily offerings and household objects of immense beauty. Similarly, in Mexico, we find art that also moves beyond mere decoration, but is embedded deeply within the culture via customs and traditions such as those exhibited via Dia De Los Muertos.
As an art teacher and service learning coordinator at Hoboken Charter School, i.e., an inclusion school where one-third of my students are “learning challenged” – many of my kids are “outsiders” themselves, and my appreciation of/for these kids gives credence and encouragement to their art-making, and in turn, their art-making feeds my own “vision.” Like the Balinese, I believe that everyone can create and contribute — thus, I teach my kids to use their art to give back to the world… And I strive to do the same with my actions and images.