Norman Lear Reshaped How America Saw Black Families
December 9, 2023 - Jonathan Abrams and Christopher Kuo for the New York Times
Beverly McIver, Norman Lear, 2022, oil on canvas, 30x30 in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Beverly McIver, an artist and professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University, remembers watching Lear’s shows every week as a child. Growing up in a housing project in Greensboro, N.C., she identified with J.J. Evans, the teenage aspiring artist who grows up in Chicago public housing, portrayed by Jimmie Walker on “Good Times.”
“These shows gave me hope that I could rise out of the project, not continue the cycle of poverty, and that I could be an artist,” she said.
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