Artist Statement

Artist Statement

Eduardo, Ricardo, and Shawn's blog on Sonny's Blues. We talk about the many themes in Sonny's Blues such as power vs. powerlessness, music, the Harlem Renaissance, and drugs. We thought this was an amazing story and thought a blog will be a great way to further analyze the story. With these themes being different and talked about in different parts of the blog you will realize that most of these themes are connected and have an effect on one another.

We started off by doing a home page that contained pictures that relate to the themes. We also didn’t want to summarize the story too much because our audience has already read the story and analyzed it. We just wanted to take it a step further.

Our following topic is the Harlem renaissance. We divided it into two sections: music and drugs. At first we were going to separate them with tabs but decided they were both subsection of the Harlem Renaissance. They both had a great impact on the Harlem Renaissance and were within it. We also have a YouTube video on the music section. The video further describes the effects music had on the Harlem Renaissance and more importantly in Sonny’s Blues. The video was a great asset as well as a good reference.

Our next tab is on power vs. powerlessness, the overall theme of the class. We analyzed both power and powerlessness extensively here. This section supports our take on the project because it can be used as a learning tool for students who want to know more about power and powerlessness in the story. Furthermore, they can comment on it to give suggestions or just feedback in general.

Our next tab contains interviews of James Baldwin, the author. We decided to include these interviews because they explain why he wrote the story and how his own life experiences influenced it. You can see that his own life experiences also dealt with the Harlem Renaissance, music, and power/ powerlessness.

We also included a citation page to reference our work.