Currently installed at museums around the country, "Question Bridge: Black Males" is part art project and part community-based educational curriculum, but it's all about black men having honest conversations with one another about their lives.
It's more about questions than answers, though. From "Do you really feel free?" to "Why wouldn't you be happy with your son being gay?" the creators say that the topics the men featured ask of each other provide a new perspective on the complexity of the black male experience.
Question Bridge: Black Males - Project Trailer from Question Bridge on Vimeo.
Chris Johnson, a professor at California College for the Arts, explained to ColorLines:
We didn’t select any of the questions for those men. We never selected questions for those men. We have a very strict rule. I mean, the whole methodology of Question Bridge works like this — I’ll give you a real clear anecdote. We’ll be driving along the street and I’ll see a tall, young black man dressed like a Guardian Angel, and I’ll say, “pull over!” And so I tap that guy on the shoulder and say, “Listen, I’m doing this project called ‘Question Bridge’ and the whole purpose is for you to provide us with, what’s for you, is a really deeply held question that you have for some other black man who you feel different from. Do you have such a question?” And every black man over the four years that we encountered said, “Oh yeah, I’ve got a question I would ask a black man if I could.”
Read more at ColorLines.