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Jacksonville Legends Mosaic: Zora Neale Hurston and Ebony Payne English
About the Subjects
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist, folklorist and novelist who was a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Her writings reflect a deep connection to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, a rural community near Orlando that was established in 1887 as the nation’s first incorporated black township. She described her hometown as “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse.”
Zora attended the Florida Baptist Academy boarding school in Jacksonville but was expelled in 1905 because she was unable to pay her tuition. In Jacksonville, Hurston experienced racism for the first time in her life. She explained that it “made me know that I was a little colored girl.”
Despite those experiences, she chose to live in Jacksonville from 1904 to 1914 and returned to Duval county after completing her bachelor’s degree in anthropology at New York’s Barnard College in 1928. She was the College’s first black graduate, and used her anthropological training to collect the folklore and stories of Blacks and rural whites. She traveled throughout Duval County and up the East Coast collecting stories, writing and performing the stories for other communities.
Zora’s experience overseeing the “Negro Unit” of the Federal Writers Project, based at the Clara White Mission in Jacksonville, influenced what became one of greatest works, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Published in 1937 it describes the life of a teenage Black girl growing up in Florida and became the most well-known of her seven books.
Hurston died in poverty on January 28, 1960, despite the successful publication of four novels, two folklore books, short stories, essays, articles and an autobiography. She is remembered for giving voice to stories of communities that had been overlooked and capturing them in ways that resonated in the everyday lives of all Americans.
Ebony Payne English
Ebony Payne-English, born July 30, 1984, is a poet, lyricist, playwright and educator from Duval County. She is the first woman to establish her own chapter of the international poetry organization, Black on Black Rhyme. Ebony is the 2017 Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville’s Emerging Artist and recipient of the Spoken Word Gala’s 2017 William Bell Humanitarian Award.
As of 2021, Ebony serves as Executive Director of The Performers Academy, a 501(c)(3) arts education organization, and is a founding member of the Board of Directors for Southern Fried Poetry, Inc. which produces the largest adult regional poetry slam in the nation.
Ebony is author of the graphic novel The Random Happenings as well as an award-winning poetry collection, Secrets of Ma’at. Ebony’s critically acclaimed play, On Purpose, was her debut as an American playwright and was soon followed by her five-play series, The Goddess Experience.
Ebony considers Zora Neale Hurston an icon and personal muse and is honored to be memorialized in her youth next to such an influential artist.
Artist Statement
Black is beautiful. It is the sum of all colors. Close your eyes, go deep in the infinite black, dream. Look at the sky, go higher into the infinite universe, black. Plant your seed in the ground, it will sprout out of the absence of light, black. Life itself is formed in a dark black womb.
Black is an infinite expression of creation. Embrace blackness through education, art, and civil rights. In honor of our heroes who fought adversity and inspired us to find new meanings and the power to succeed. Let’s keep building an inclusive future together.
About the Art
Celso González, Puerto Rican mosaic artist, was born on May 17, 1973 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. From an early age his motivation was to create monumental murals. From his art studies in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico and then architecture in Sci-Arc, California. He has already made numerous exhibitions in countries as diverse as Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, Italy, France and Taiwan among others. He also develops in the scenography, illumination, film work, furniture design and construction.
Celso’s art is reflective, it is an introspective work, always honored his Loiceña and Rio Grande roots, where some of the magic that abounds in his compositions germinates. Although today he feels more inclined to interpretation and abstract experimentation, his earlier work, the use of allegorical symbolisms to their roots, such as the vejigante, the popular culture masks, the baquiné and bomba and plena among others. More than nostalgia, Celso celebrates where he came from, where he has gone and where he is going.
Throughout his career Celso has collaborated with important artists from different disciplines including Bill Viola, Carlos Cruz Diez, Ted Carrasco, Wayne Isham, Robi Draco Rosa, William Cepeda to name a few. For the past 8 years, Celso has been working on a commission of the government of Puerto Rico, developing around 40 Public Art projects that can be appreciated in monumental murals throughout the island.
He has dedicated himself to artistry and reveals to us in his interior, his hope, that which says: “Look, I am here and from here I have come”.
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