“Rewind the Future”, Extra Series, No. XX

As a child in Marietta, Georgia I would spend hours in front of the radio with my finger eagerly awaiting to press the REC button on my tape deck. The minute I would get home from school, I would run up to my room, close the door, and curl myself around my stereo to hear the latest sounds from “Annie Bannanie” and her collection of music on Album 88, a college radio station operated by Georgia State University. It was my only REAL connection to Atlanta, GA.. the big city that I longed to live in, and I spent years hypnotically listening to the recorded sounds from my metropolitan life line out in the small southern suburb I lived in.

Mix tapes were like novels to me. The minute I’d record a full 90 minutes of the sounds I loved, I would spend hours decorating these tapes like I was drawing a cover for a book. They were diaries to me with chapters of songs filled with paragraphs of beats and words made of guitar strums and voices. My friends back then, would receive gifts of all the songs I recorded. They were like paintings. They were songs wrapped in my artwork.

In finalizing the “Children of the 1980’s” series, I wanted to hone in on those icons of nostalgia that brought me to where I am today as an adult swimming in the chaotic seas of the art world. This piece, much like “Dataworld.exe”, really focuses on those primary art executions of my youth, and I sought to draw these tapes as if these were personal collections of each core Disney character. Here you will see mix tapes drawn on from each character. From “Minnie’s Mo Town” to “Clarabelle’s Classics”, each tape has a youthful twinge to it associated to each character and the music that is paired with them.

This is the 70th in the collection and 10th in the series,. This piece closes out the “Children of the 1980’s” series for the TENxTENxTEN project.