Joe Barry Carroll joined Alan Karpick for a recent interview on ‘Gold and Black LIVE’. A 1980 a graduate of Purdue’s Krannert School of Management, Carroll was first team All-American in 1980 and led Purdue to its most rec appearance Final Four. He was also a overall first pick of the 1980 NBA Draft (Golden State Warriors) and played in the league for NBA and played for 11 years.
Carroll, who now lives in Atlanta is an artist, author, and financial advisor. His paintings have been on display at Purdue’s Black Cultural Center and at the greater Lafayette Museum of Art and in other locations around the country. Carroll had much to say on a variety of topics including his new book “My View from Seven Feet.”
GoldandBlack.com: In your artwork and in your books you embraced the difficulty of growing up poor in the south (Arkansas, before moving to Denver in high school) without making it seem difficult. How do you do that?
Carroll: I appreciate the compliment, but I think it’s just a process for any of us. I think we just have to keep moving. People will ask me questions because of the way I write in the book, it seems like perhaps I know something that I really don’t because I’m just showing up and trying again and again because we have to keep going. But sometimes writing a book suggests that you know more than you do, and you don’t. You’ve just written a book and collected your thoughts there as any of us do in kind of a reflective way.
GoldandBlack.com: You are also quick to give credit when taking someone else’s work and then you interpret it as you view it to make. That’s an interesting way of looking at it.
Carroll: We all are. The world is too old to come up with anything original. Whatever we see is somebody’s interpretation of what it’s going to be, what it is for them. I think that’s fine. I don’t try to copy people, but I’m filtering my life experiences through these ideas, this theology.
GoldandBlack.com: You are also trying to get more exposure to African Art with the help of the Zamora family and the Black Cultural Center at Purdue, and your work too. Was that the plan when you began working on your art of did it just evolve?
Carroll: We spent a lot of time talking about the idea of something. Once you get past the idea and brainstorming, you actually have to think on it. Now we’re moving. Once we agreed with the Zamora family to take this work on, we cataloged it, I created a trust. I’m the sole trustee so I don’t have to caucus with a lot of people.
But you’re looking for creative ways to get the work out there, to have the world see it because it’s really important to the Zamoras that everyone sees the work, especially younger people to understand the traditions of Africa and other traditions of the world, because they originate a lot of the language on a lot of these values.
I was trying to find a creative way, instead of just going to someone and saying ‘can I post these artifacts to where people can walk in and walk out’, I wanted to make them relatable.
African Art, because of the rituals and history surrounding it, sometimes it’s viewed as inaccessible or in this vaulted place that people can’t reach, and I thought if we related it to our own lives on a daily basis, that maybe we would have a greater chance to share the importance of it. I think it’s happening, that’s the comments I’m getting from people that it makes more sense to them now.
GoldandBlack.com: Art is you avocation, what does your day job look like?
Carroll: I am an investment advisor. I manage money for high network families, so mostly athletes. Anywhere from five to some have as much as 20 million. I just help them preserve their wealth and approach the whole culture of wealth and what I hope is a more healthy and holistic way.
GoldandBlack.com: Does your art and your vocation complement each other?
Carroll: They do for me. I’m a client so I have to stay on top the research and I understand everything for my own personal needs and requirements. It also gives me a balance. I need these two things. In my studio, on one side it has a desk and computer screens and research and graphs and all of that. On the other side is an easel. You kind of toggle back and forth. It keeps me sane and healthy.”
GoldandBlack.com: How does one go about buying your art? They are up for exhibit but do you also sell paintings?
Carroll: They will be available for sale one day. Right now, I’m trying to keep the entire show (for exhibit). There’s about 100 pieces I have, and I want to keep them all in-tact for now because I like to have the flexibility to travel the show. For me, especially since I don’t work full-time as an artist, I just keep everything right now (simple) so that it can travel as the opportunities present themselves
GoldandBlack.com: This painting is from your new book, “My View from Seven Feet,” talk about this painting. This is interesting because your father is in there.
Carroll: This is my father’s face and the hat reoccurs in many of my compositions. The outfit is just an old outfit from Elizabethan almost garb. Down lower, there’s fabric from one of my mother’s old fashioned pictures of Jesus, Martin Luther King, and the crucifixion that most Christians have in the house. I just kind of put all that together.
GoldandBlack.com: You quote your mother in this (above) painting, and I love how you word things. One of the greatest moments in the history of Mackey Arena was when Joe said farewell to the Mackey Arena crowd on senior day and gave roses to his mother. Tell me about this painting and the story.
Carroll: There’s an old saying in the South and maybe some other places “That’s your little red wagon, you can push it or pull it.” So I wanted to work with that. This is actually my face from a photograph and the rest of it is a painting in various forms.
It’s the story around me getting in trouble. I was trying to be slick, I must have been eight or nine. My mother just didn’t tolerate that, neither of my parents would tolerate foolishness. She really wanted to just, as they say, jerk a knot in me.
I’ll often give my mother credit for a lot of the discipline that I have in my life. She established early on that there wouldn’t be any foolishness. I don’t know if it’s because she had a house full of children and she didn’t have time to micromanage each child and each set of events and she was away working all the time. It was just very clear that you just didn’t want to do it. Any trouble I got into as a child, it was an accident because I did not want to face that woman on the other side.
GoldandBlack.com: Tell me the story of how the whole Senior Night transpired with your mom?
Carroll: I bought the roses before the game, because on senior night they give your parents a little flower. For some reason I thought that my mother should get more than that. I bought her a dozen roses before the game, left early in time to stop by the florist and get the roses and I brought them and made the arrangement to have them behind the bench the second half.
I explained to Coach (Lee) Rose this is what I want to do, and he said we had to win the game and do what we needed to do. I really don’t know the answer to where it came from, but it was just my imagination and idea. I purposefully walked across the center of the court, because I knew they couldn’t play the game while this was going on, and gave them to her. I still remain impressed with my mother’s presence of mind. She gave me a hug and we exchanged I love you's and then she just started waving to the crowd like it was her night. It wasn’t just senior night, it was my Annie Mae Carroll night too. It was a great memory. As big as my career was, which I’m very grateful for, many Purdue people have come to me over the years reminding me of that event.
GoldandBlack.com: Talk about this piece because I like this one as well.
Carroll: In the book, I talk about the frustration of dealing with children as they grow up. I have been ten of thirteen children overall. I have a lot of nephews and nieces and I try to spend time with them because with all the work I do publicly, putting on profits and charitable work, I try to do a comparable amount in my own family. They grow up and they make you crazy because they frustrate you. Something happens to them when they become teenagers. There’s a quote “Our children are not ours, they just come through us and it’s not us to tell them what to do.” This was just a piece, and I thought it would be wonderful to kind of have this piano lesson going on with this child, and the wonderment of children. Hopefully they come back one day, but sometimes they just seem insane for that period of time.
GoldandBlack.com: Were you that teenager?
Carroll: No, I was a pleaser child. I always was a pleaser child. All children aren’t that way. One of my nephews, he calls me and he references me as Uncle Barry or whatever. It’s deference that he gives me that reflects the investment I put into his life. Some of my other family members, however, they just don’t want to be bothered. I’m just a dinosaur to them. Even if we meet people and people are responding to me, they’re like, why are they responding to you?
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