Victoria's Zu the artist

Trinidad birds inspire Zu the Artist

By William Doyle-Marshall

At age five his parents Yeewing and Jeanette Fortune` took him to Canada from Trinidad. As a result Andrew Fortune` had the luxury of spending his two summer months back in the twin island republic. Many years later, we sit in an office in Victoria, British Columbia, and he smiles about the memory of birds being part of his life. He goes by the name Zu the Artist.

  “In the mornings, different birds would come out and I know what stage I am in waking up because different birds are coming out or in the day if it’s really hot, the birds are quiet or if there is going to be a big storm coming through, the birds are telling you something different so I definitely had a big connection with the birds and I went to a lot of different places because my family is spread out on the island so I got to see a lot of different birds. So there was definitely a big connection for me,” Fortune` reflects.

 It was a Saturday afternoon in January when I met the artist at a downtown office on Fort Street. He had created a profile of Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada and presented it to her at the opening of the party’s western Canada campaign office. Some of his works were on display as well.

Zu the Artist with his pet

   Earlier this year Fortune` created a series of works titled “Invisible Women of the Civil Rights Movement”. This illustrates his social conscience in operation. The artist unearths information about women we know very little about. Fannie Lou Hamer, an American voting rights activist and civil rights leader is among them. She was an organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. She served as Vice-Chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She also earned an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humanities and many more awards. “President Lyndon Johnson, fearful of the power of Hamer’s testimony on live television, called an emergency press conference in an effort to divert press coverage.”

   “On June 9, 1963, Hamer was on her way back from Charleston, South Carolina with other activists from a literacy workshop. Stopping in Winona, Mississippi, the group was arrested on a false charge and jailed. Once in jail, Hamer and her colleagues were beaten savagely by the police, almost to the point of death.”

   Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray an American civil and women’s rights activist, lawyer, and author is another of those Fortune` profiled for his online project. She was the First African-American to receive a J.S.D. from Yale. She was the first black woman ordained an Episcopal priest and was denied further work at Harvard University because of her gender. Murray served as vice president of Benedict College. She argued a case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that women have an equal right to serve on juries. Dr. Murray was co-founder of the National Organization for Women. “In 1940, Murray was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia segregation laws after they sat in the whites-only section of a bus. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, inspired her to become a civil rights lawyer”

   Another of Fortune` “Invisible Women” is Clara Luper, was a schoolteacher, organizer in the Civil Rights Movement who took part in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches where she received a deep cut in her leg on Bloody Sunday when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with tear gas and billy clubs. She, her young son and daughter, and numerous young members of the NAACP Youth Council held sit-in protests of downtown drugstore lunch-counters which overturned their policies of segregation.

Zu speaking at a community function

  Zu seriously started working on his art last fall after visiting New York for vacation. “I ran around looking at the art, trying to see what I can do for myself and what would make me happy. So I started playing around and then I started learning a lot of different ways of how to produce this stuff and then I became really serious about it. I stopped working and start doing this full-time. So the last couple months really is all that I used to get to where I am now.

   The artist’s influences are being drawn from the area in Arima, Trinidad on Aleong Street off Malabar Road, near the Arima Market. Those images and experiences with members of his family are indelible in his mind.