screw him, no doubt the guy is a leftist in a leftist city, it is what fascists do, he no doubt didn’t care when they were stealing our wealth for his friends in the hood.
Don’t be bigoted. I would not vouch for him if he were unworthy. He is not in the least extremist and mixes with people of all races, including his own family members. My close (Irish-Italian) friends since the early 60s have been Dupree’s close friends for nearly 50 years. I have heard nothing but wonderful things about him, his wife and his daughters. It is embarrassing when white people cannot accept accomplished black people. Would you call fascist if this were happening to a typical Irish-American?
Most visual artists lean left because they are “lo-info” about politics, their early working lives are impoverished and their income stream is irregular. As an artist myself, I was perhaps the only conservative in my graduting class from art school, mainly because I had grown up in DC and was not typically “lo-info.”
Dupree does not live in his studio nor in “the ghetto”. However, he located his studio in a racially mixed area directly next to the residence areas of two nationally major, majority-white universities. Artists of all colors typically find buildings in low-cost, racially mixed neighborhoods when they are starting out, and often are the source of great revitalization when they do so. Most of my artist friends from the 60s bought run-down rowhouses in white ethnic working-class neighborhoods for around $20K, fixed them up beautifully and imaginatively over the years, and are now sitting on $300K to $1.2 million or more in market value as Philadelphia experienced a renaissance, fueled in part by Federal and state grants in various areas. Should all the whites who benefited lose their properties? James greatly improved his studio property in a majority-black mixed neighborhood and now the City is taking it from him.