Old Wounds
The New Yorker, November 17, 1997

Before Steven Spielberg began principle photography on “Amistad”—the first large-scale Hollywood movie to confront the brutal history of American slavery—last winter, he wanted the film’s key scenes to be story-boarded (i.e. illustrated shot by shot). The actress Debbie Allen, who had brought the Amistad slave rebellion to the director’s attention in the first place, recommended Kadir Nelson for the job. Nelson’s was then a twenty-two-year-old Southern Californian with a recent B.F.A from Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, and his emotional, sure-handed scenes of African-American life had much impressed her. As it turned out, his sketches for “Amistad” became a marked influence on Spielberg’s directorial palette. In looking through his edgy illustrations, one is reminded of Henri Rousseau’s lush color and of Jacob Lawrence’s narrative sense. Nelson’s paintings for “Amistad” richly reveal a young man’s attempt to come to grips with himself as a late-twentieth-century black American by confronting the atrocities committed against his ancestors. The five paintings opposite will be included in “Give Us Free,” to be published early next year by Newmarket Press.