First name Marvin, middle name Sinclair: M. SIN is the nom de plume that the artist Marvin Kelly uses when he is presenting his art.
Kelly has constructed leather-crafted, wearable art objects for the last 50+ years. His MarvinSin.com website displays the pocketbooks, earrings, bracelets, and cellphone pouches he etches with African-inspired carvings and drawings.
Crafting wearable art became one of Kelly’s central sources of income back when he was in college at Columbia University. He usually made drawings and paintings, but one day, he saw his roommate working with Tandy carving leather, and the prospect of sketching his designs on this special type of canvas lured him in.
“One of the reasons that I shifted from painting into what we call wearable art or craft was because many of the painters who I admired and respected were kind of waiting on a line, on a long line––waiting to be noticed or acknowledged or appreciated––and the line wasn’t moving,” Kelly reflected. “To be an artist, a Black artist, rendering imagery reflective of our culture? Back then, there was no room for it, no space for it. Even the Black curators turned their noses up at it, so, there was no room, and I thought, what’s the use of getting on the end of a line that’s not moving? Let me start my own lane.”
Kelly continued making art throughout his college years, even when he was approved for a work study assignment at NYCHA’s Grant Houses. There he met Lloyd Williams, the future CEO of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, who at that time was director of an afterschool teen recreation program. Together, the two came up with a cultural project program of entertainment, African fashions, and projects for the kids. Their success led them to create an event planning company called Blackfrica Promotions, which was designed to connect community members to their African culture.
“I guess the difference in our perspective was that it was like, ‘Come as you are: African.’ With most other organizations, you had to kind of go through a ritual transformation: You had to change your name, your attire, your something, to represent your African spirit. Our model was to say, ‘You’re an African any way that you exist.’ We were using that to invite people to experience a culture that, in many cases, they felt excluded from, because again, you had to jump through and over these hurdles or through these hoops to be connected to it.”
Blackfrica Promotions and Kelly and Williams’s active participation with Percy Sutton and Charles Rangel’s local political club led to their being invited to helm the Harlem Chamber of Commerce ,which had an almost 90% white membership at the time. They weren’t sure about the best way to reach out to Harlem’s local Black organizations and bring them into the Chamber of Commerce until they came up with the idea to create a “Harlem Day”––a platform that would showcase some of the work and projects of organizations that were active in the Harlem community.
“The image of the Harlem community was very negative,” Kelly recalled. “There was still a lot of drugs, some no-go zones in the Harlem community, places you really didn’t even want to be at after dark. There was that image issue. The combination of putting a brighter light, [a] positive face, on the Harlem community and allowing some of the organizations that were doing great work to showcase what they were doing became a collaboration of meeting with all these folks and talking about the idea and getting their input. That was the genesis.”
Sutton’s political pull allowed them to get all the city agencies––from the transit police to sanitation––to cooperate with the planning for Harlem Day. Buses were re-routed and the police cordoned off the street. But on the morning of August 28, 1974, Harlem Day began in pouring rain.
“We had a cut-off time of maybe about 8 a.m. or something where we had to give a go or no-go to the agencies, about whether this was going to happen or not. At around 7:30 or so, it tapered off a little bit and I remember that some of the members from the National Black Theater and our group, Blackfrica—we walked out into the rain, and…it stopped raining, and it was on. The rest, as they say, is history. But…it was inches away from never happening.”
Kelly no longer lives in New York City. Although born and raised in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Kelly said the pace of life in New York didn’t work for him. As Blackfrica Promotions took off, he began regularly planning two to three events a week, “and before you could resolve one, there were two more on the plate, and then you did those and there were more. There was never a time to reflect, analyze, grow from the event: It was just a rapid succession of things, things, always things, and you were still functioning at that same pace. It was just too fast for my spirit, and I could never see the fruits of my labor; I was giving and giving and giving, and there was nothing feeding me back. After a while, it just wore me down.”
Kelly still returns every year to take part in Harlem Week. Since 1979, he has had a designated table at the event where folks can purchase his culturally inspired wearable art.