young man

As one way to keep tabs on President Trump’s state of mind, I’m on his email fundraising lists. Lately his 79-year-old mind has seemed to be on his mortality.

“I want to try and get to heaven” has been the subject line on roughly a half-dozen Trump emails since mid-August. Oddly, one arrived earlier this month on the same day that the commander in chief separately posted on social media a meme of himself as “Apocalypse Now” character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, satisfyingly surveying the hellish conflagration that his helicopters had wreaked, not on Vietnam but on Chicago. “Chipocalypse” was Trump’s warning to the next U.S. city that he might militarize.

Mixed messages, to be sure.

The president hasn’t limited his celestial contemplations to online outlets. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he told the hosts of “Fox & Friends” in August, by way of explaining his (failed) effort to bring peace to Ukraine. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well.”

Well, Mr. President, here’s some advice: I don’t think you’ll get to heaven by wishing that many of your fellow citizens go to hell.

The disconnect between Trump’s dreams of eternal reward and his earthly avenging — against Democrat-run cities, political rivals, late-show hosts and other celebrity critics, universities, law firms, cultural institutions, TV networks and newspapers, liberal groups and donors, government employees, insufficiently loyal allies and even harmless protesters at a Washington restaurant — was rarely so evident as it was at the Christian revival that was Sunday’s memorial for the slain MAGA activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

Mere minutes after Erika Kirk, Kirk’s widow and successor as head of the conservative group Turning Point USA, had tearfully forgiven her husband’s accused killer, the president explicitly contradicted her with a message of hate toward his own enemies, and his continued determination to exact revenge.

Erika Kirk spoke of “Charlie’s mission” of engaging his critics and working “to save young men just like the one who took his life.” She recalled the crucified Christ absolving his executioners on Calvary, then emotionally added: “That young man. I forgive him.”

“I forgive him because it was what Christ did and what Charlie would do,” she said to applause. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

Then it was Trump’s turn.

Just one minute in, he called the 22-year-old suspect “a radicalized cold-blooded monster.” And throughout, despite investigators’ belief that the man acted alone, Trump reiterated for the umpteenth time since Kirk’s death that “radical left lunatics” — his phrase for Democrats — actually were responsible and that the Justice Department would round up those complicit for retribution.

Trump acknowledged that Charlie Kirk probably wouldn’t agree with his approach: “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them.” Then Teleprompter Trump went off script, reverting to real Trump and ad-libbing: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” He spat the word “hate” with venom. And he got applause, just as Erika Kirk had for a very different message.

Jesus counseled “turn the other cheek” to rebuke those who harm us. Trump boasts that he always punches back. “If someone screws you, screw them back 10 times harder,” he once said. Love your enemies, as Christ commanded in his Sermon on the Mount? Nah. You heard Trump in Arizona: “I hate my opponent.”

Trump might have some explaining to do when he seeks admittance at the pearly gates.

The Bible’s words aside, a president is supposed to be the comforter in chief after a tragedy and a uniter when divisions rend the American fabric. Think of President Clinton, whose oratory bridged partisan fissures after antigovernment domestic terrorists bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, and of President George W. Bush, who visited a mosque in Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in a healing gesture intended to blunt rising anti-Muslim reactions. (Later, of course, Bush would cleave the nation by invading Iraq based on a lie about its complicity.)

Trump, by contrast, is the inciter in chief. Just hours after Kirk’s death on Sept. 10, and before a suspect was in custody, he addressed the nation, blaming “radical left political violence.” He has repeated that indictment nearly every day since, though the FBI has reported for years — including during his first term — that domestic right-wing violence is the greater threat. “We have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump told reporters. When even one of his friends on “Fox & Friends” noted radicals are on the right as well, Trump replied: “I couldn’t care less. … The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible.”

All of this vituperation and vengeance suggests a big “what if”: What if Trump were more like Charlie Kirk? To ask is not to gloss over Kirk’s controversial utterances against Black Americans, gay and transgender Americans and others, but he did respectfully deal with those who disagreed with him — as he was doing when he was shot.

What if Trump, since 2016, had sincerely tried to broaden his political reach, as presidential nominees and presidents of each party historically did, to embrace his opponents and to compromise with them? What if he governed for all Americans and not just his MAGA voters? He might well have enacted bipartisan laws of the sort that Trump 1.0 promised on immigration, gun safety, infrastructure and more. In general we’d all be better off, less polarized.

And with a more magnanimous approach like that, Trump just might have a better chance at getting into heaven.

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Like many young men these days, Kamaldeep Dhanoa, a lanky 17-year-old, knew he wanted to do something with his life, be a part of something, but didn’t quite know what that meant.

Coming up with a career was important. But even more, it was finding the right friends — discovering what he wanted to be a part of.

He did both when he joined Improve Your Tomorrow, a mentorship organization for teenage boys and young men — that vulnerable, chronically online demographic from which Charlie Kirk drew many of his most ardent supporters, and where so much of our societal angst is focused in the wake of his death.

Now a senior at Florin High School in a suburb outside Sacramento, Dhanoa has a plan to become a paramedic, and more importantly, has those friendships that help him feel not just connected, but included and valued.

His something.

“I just know I have brothers around me,” he told me Tuesday. “We’re always with each other. It gives you, like, a sense of security. So if you’re feeling down, you could always, always rely on them.”

Dhanoa was hanging out in his school’s gym with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who dropped by to announce the California Men’s Service Challenge, an effort to recruit 10,000 Golden State males to serve as mentors to boys such as Dhanoa, so more boys can find their something.

It’s a worthy effort and before you jump to thinking it’s a reaction to Kirk, I’ll point out that 10 years ago, California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, made a documentary about the crisis of connection and identity facing young men, “The Mask You Live In.”

Recently, her husband caught up.

To be fair, a lot of us have been slow on the uptake when it comes to understanding why so many young men seem drawn to the obvious loneliness and disconnection of chronically online lives.

Kamaldeep Dhanoa, 17, and Michael Lynch helped Gov. Gavin Newsom announce his new statewide initiative to engage more men in volunteer and mentorship work.

(Anita Chabria/Los Angeles Times)

“Touch grass” has become a generation’s cultural shorthand to describe both the isolation and cure for people who seem so deep into a virtual world that the real one has lost meaning. It’s a dismissive way of looking at a problem that doesn’t begin and end with boys.

But, if we didn’t see it earlier, Kirk’s killing has made it clear that there are too many boys that need to be pulled back from the brink of a very bad something. One that is less about left or right and more about exactly who and what those boys stumble upon inside those ethereal spaces that most parents can’t even find, much less understand.

“We’ve got to get these kids back,” Newsom said. “They’re very susceptible young men. They’re very vulnerable online.”

Even more concerning, when the nihilism of the darkest corners of the internet catches up to their psyches, “young people weaponize those grievances,” Newsom said — whether that anger turns inward or outward.

Suicide among young men has increased. In 2023, the male suicide rate was about 23 deaths per 100,000 men, nearly four times higher than for women, a number that has been climbing for years (albeit with some slight dips). Sadly, women attempt suicide more often, but men have a higher rate of completion, often because they use more deadly means such as guns.

But lonely boys are also more prone to commit violence on others, maybe especially when they mix their anger with politics. Once recent study by social epidemiologist Julia Schleimer at the University of Washington School of Public Health found that individuals who reported having few social connections were, “more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another.”

For reference, about 15% of men have no close friendships, according to a recent poll by the Survey Center on American Life. Newsom puts that figure even higher for young men, with “one in four men under 30 years old reporting that they have no close friends, a five-fold increase since 1990.”

Kirk stepped into that gap, providing meaning and belonging not just through his podcasts, where he was best known, but through the grassroots Turning Point USA organization that gave thousands of young people (of both sexes) both an ideology and, equally as important, real-world connections and events.

“Obviously Charlie Kirk was a master at not only the work he did online, but offline, and his capacity to organize and engage,” Newsom said.

Whether you agreed with Kirk’s views or not (and I did not agree on many points, including matters of race, sexual orientation, immigration or the meaning of patriotism), he created that something that is missing for so many young people. He created a vision of an America that needed to be saved, and could be saved, through a dedication to a certain kind of family and a certain kind of faith. As Newsom described it of his own effort, young people don’t just want a cause. They want to feel invested, they want to feel an “obligation to give back.”

If Newsom’s recent foray into Trump-esque social media proves anything, it’s that he’s willing to learn, even emulate, success — wherever he finds it. Newsom is trying to offer the belonging that Kirk supplied, seeped not in the exclusion and rigidity that Kirk embodied, but in California values.

“It’s about building an inclusive community of all different kinds of voices,” Michael Lynch told me of the California Challenge. He’s the co-founder and chief executive of Improve Your Tomorrow, the organization Dhanoa belongs to.

Lynch said kids get all kinds of benefits from mentors, but when he asks what those are, the sentence usually starts, “Now that I have friends…. “

The outcome of the effort to bring boys out of the virtual world is all about who those friends are, who pulls them out.

Our boys don’t just need to touch grass, they need to be around men who don’t seek to impose values, but teach them how to craft their own, how to believe in themselves before they believe in something someone is selling.

“What the world needs is your authenticity,” Newsom told a teenage journalist who covered the event for the school newspaper. “And so I just hope we take a deep breath and discover the most important, powerful thing in the world, and that’s who you are.”

If Newsom’s effort inspires just one good man to step up and help a kid figure that out — who they are, and how to believe in themselves first and forever — it will be something.

SEOUL — It’s a worldwide shift that has taken political scientists and sociologists by surprise: the growing ideological divide between young men and women.

In the recent U.S. presidential election, President Trump won 56% of the vote among men ages 18 to 29, according to an analysis from Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

In Germany, young men are twice as likely as young women to support the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, according to the Pew Research Center. Last year’s European Parliament elections showed a similar trend. According to the European Policy Center, in Portugal, Denmark and Croatia, more than four young men voted for far-right candidates for every young woman who did the same.

But few countries exemplify the trend more than South Korea, where a recent presidential election showed just how polarized its youth has become.

In South Korea, 74.1% of men in their 20s and 60.3% of men in their 30s voted for one of the two conservative candidates compared with 35.6% and 40.5% of their female counterparts, respectively.

Experts say the so-called 2030 male (men in their 20s and 30s) phenomenon, which emerged alongside the mainstreaming of gender equality discourse in South Korea over the last decade, has defied traditional left-right taxonomies.

The “2030 men are difficult to define under standard electoral theory frameworks,” said Kim Yeun-sook, a political scientist at Seoul National University’s Institute of Korean Political Studies.

Having come of age in a world with radically different social contracts than those of their parents, right-leaning 2030 male voters are less likely to focus on North Korea — a defining preoccupation for older conservatives — than on feminism, which for them has become a dirty word that conjures “freeloading” women trying to take more than they are owed.

The men have taken umbrage with visual symbols or hand gestures — such as a pinched forefinger and thumb — that they argue are anti-male dog whistles used by feminists, in some cases succeeding in getting companies to discontinue marketing campaigns featuring such offending content.

South Korean women supporting the #MeToo movement stage a rally to mark the upcoming International Women’s Day in Seoul on March 4, 2018.

(Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)

In the 2022 presidential election, it was men in their 20s and 30s who helped Yoon Suk Yeol — the conservative candidate who claimed that structural sexism no longer existed — clinch a razor-thin victory over his liberal opponent, Lee Jae-myung, who was elected president in June.

This perception that men — not women — are the true victims of gender discrimination in contemporary society is a defining belief for many young South Korean men, says Chun Gwan-yul, a data journalist and the author of “20-something Male,” a book about the phenomenon that draws on extensive original polling of young South Koreans.

Although male backlash to contemporary feminism is the most visible aspect of the phenomenon, Kim Chang-hwan, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, says that its roots go back to socioeconomic changes that began much earlier.

Among them was a series of government policies three decades earlier that led to a surge in both male and female college enrollment, which soared from around 30% of the general population in 1990 to 75% in 2024. Add to that the increasingly long-term participation of women in the workforce, Kim said, and “the supply of educated labor has ended up outpacing economic growth.”

“The young men of today are now feeling like they are having to compete five times harder than the previous generation,” he said.

(Despite the fact that gender inequality in South Korea’s job market is among the worst in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with women making on average around 65% of their male counterparts and far more likely to be precariously employed, such wage gaps tend to be less prominent for earners in their 20s.)

And although most research has shown that the negative effect of South Korea’s male-only compulsory military service — which lasts up to 21 months — on wages and employment is minimal, anxieties about getting a later start than women in a hypercompetitive job market have also contributed to young South Korean men feeling that they are getting a raw deal.

Chun, the data journalist, points out that the mass entry of women into higher education also led to another tectonic shift being felt by the current crop of young men: the rapid collapse of traditional marriage dynamics.

“Women have been doing the math and are increasingly concluding marriage is a net loss for them,” he said. “South Korea transformed from a society where marriage was universal into a marriage-is-optional one in an incredibly short time frame, especially compared to many Western countries where those changes played out over 60 or 70 years.”

In 2000, just 19% of South Koreans between the ages of 30 and 34 were unmarried, but today that number is 56%, according to government data. Over a third of women between 25 and 49 years old now say they don’t ever want to get married, compared with 13% of men, according to a government survey last year. One in 4 men will now remain unmarried in their 40s.

South Korean women take part in a rally to mark International Women’s Day in downtown Seoul on March 8, 2024.

(Jung Yeon-je/ AFP/Getty Images)

Chun notes that the mismatch in the marriage landscape has bred in many the misogynistic resentment associated with incels, a term for men who identify as involuntarily celibate. A common refrain among young conservative men is the swearing-off of South Korean women, who are often cast as “kimchi women” — gold diggers who are unwilling to pull their weight while demanding too much of men.

“Do you need to only date Korean women just because you’re Korean? No,” said Chul Gu, an online personality popular among young men in a recent stream. “There are Thai women, Russian women, women of all nationalities. There is no need to suffer the stress of dating a Korean kimchi woman.”

Resentment toward South Korean women, Chun says, is inseparable from the generational animus that feeds it.

“In the worldview of young South Korean men, they aren’t just fighting women, they are fighting the older generation that is siding with those women,” he said. “It’s essentially an anti-establishment ethos.”

The “586 generation,” as they are commonly called, are South Koreans in their 50s or 60s who came of age during the high-growth, authoritarian period of the 1980s. Associated with the pro-democracy movements of the time, the 586 generation is one of the most liberal and pro-gender equality demographics in South Korea — and one whose members built much of their wealth through cheap real estate, an avenue no longer available for the majority of young South Koreans accustomed to seeing housing prices in Seoul double in as little as four years.

“Young South Koreans are seeing those homes become worth millions,” Chun said. “Meanwhile, South Korea’s birth rate is falling and life expectancy is rising to 80 or 90, so many young voters are thinking, ‘We’re going to have to be responsible for them for the next 40 to 50 years.’”

Among the candidates in last month’s presidential election, it was Lee Jun-seok, a 40-year-old third-party conservative candidate, who most aggressively targeted these tensions.

During his campaign, Lee promised to segregate South Korea’s fast-depleting national pension by age, a move he said would relieve younger South Koreans of the burden of subsidizing the older generation’s retirement.

Although he finished with just 8% of the total vote, he won the largest share — 37.2% — of the 20-something male vote, and 25.8% from men in their 30s.

“South Korea is very much locked into a two-party system where it is generally rare to see a third party candidate make much of a difference,” Kim, the political scientist, said. “I think there’s a lot of negative polarization at play — an expression of defeatism or disenfranchisement at the fact that status quo politicians aren’t addressing young men’s problems.”

Data show that disillusionment with democracy too runs deep.

According to a recent survey of 1,514 South Koreans by the East Asia Institute, a Seoul-based think tank, just 62.6% of South Korean men between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that democracy is the best political system — the lowest percentage in any age and gender group — with nearly a quarter believing that a dictatorship can sometimes be more preferable.

Whether the rightward drift of young South Korean men is a temporary deviation or a more serious forecast for South Korea’s democracy is still an open question, according to Kim.

“But now is the time to act,” she said. “There absolutely needs to be a political response to the younger generations’ frustrations.”

L.A. has long been a beacon for the arts. So it’s only fitting that “Forever,” the Netflix series that showrunner Mara Brock Akil envisioned as “a love story within a love letter to Los Angeles,” celebrates local artists.

The Midcentury Modern home of Justin Edwards, one half of the couple whose love story informs the show — an adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel — is flooded with work from Black Angelenos.

“Local Los Angeles artists were important for me to put into the sets, and the Edwards family home, specifically, being collectors of Los Angeles art,” Akil, an L.A. native, told The Times.

Production designer Suzuki Ingerslev and set decorator Ron Franco are also Angelenos, which they said contributed to the cultural competency of their work on “Forever.” Although the writers’ strike made elements of their jobs difficult, both agreed that their experience on “Forever” was uniquely positive, in large part because of their curation of the art in the Edwards’ home.

“Sometimes art can really make a space and it makes a statement and it tells you who the character is,” said Ingerslev. “In this case, you really knew who the Edwards were — they curated art and they cared about where they live — and I thought that really made a big difference through the art and through the furnishings as well.”

Franco agreed, saying he had fun sourcing artwork from Black artists that matched Ingerslev’s color palette and also contained themes pertinent to the show.

“A lot of times the shows that you see now are just headshots and everything that we put up becomes a background piece that’s kind of blurred,” he said. “We are very lucky in that this camera really opened up, and you follow everybody through both of the [permanent] sets and you really feel a lot.”

Audiences noticed their effort, said Ingerslev, who’s been bombarded with questions about the artworks in “Forever,” which was just renewed for a second season.

Here are five local Black artists whose work are featured in the show.

Noah Humes, 31

Humes cites a book about artist and writer Romare Bearden that he received from Akil when he was 6 years old as the foundation for his worldview as an artist. (Humes’ mother was a casting director on “Girlfriends,” the 2000s TV series created by Akil, whom Humes calls “Auntie Mara.”)

“I look back [and] that’s what helped form and shape my energy with how I approach the canvas, wanting to tell the story of my community and different things that I see — social moments, political moments, historical remnants,” said the figurative painter.

Humes is drawn to bright colors that capture the vibrancy of his hometown of L.A. “Her” and “Mid City,” which feature prominently in the Edwards family’s media room in “Forever,” depict solitary figures against yellow backgrounds. The foliage in “Her” grows in Humes’ mother’s frontyard. “Mid City,” the neighborhood where Humes was raised, features the red-crowned parrots that wake him up every morning.

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1. “Her” (Noah Humes) 2. “Mid City” (Noah Humes)

“I felt inclined to represent and show a certain subtlety of ‘We’re here, we’re centered, we’re always a focal point of unfortunate times, but also we can overcome things and become stronger than we have been,’” Humes said of the twin paintings, which he completed in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the national racial reckoning that followed.

Humes also credits his neighbors in L.A., a “system of Black excellence,” for positively influencing his artistry. Animator Lyndon Barrois (“Happy Feet,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks”) is his mentor, and members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, including siblings Syd and Travis “Taco” Bennett, as well as Thebe Kgositsile — who uses the stage name Earl Sweatshirt — are his childhood friends.

Francis ‘Tommy’ Mitchell, 41

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

Mitchell has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but it was a high school classmate pointing out the permanent nature of a ballpoint pen that led to his aha moment.

“You can erase graphite, you can paint over acrylic and oil,” said the Baltimore- and L.A.-based artist. “Ink is one of those things that I just think of, no pun intended here, it’s forever.”

Mitchell’s portraits feature individuals shaded with ink set against monochromatic acyrlic background. Because it is extremely time-consuming, most artists working in ink compose smaller, more intimate images, said Mitchell. In contrast, his portraits are huge. If the work were hung on the walls of a museum, the viewer may never notice the figure’s skin was drawn in ink and not paint.

“Going to museums or galleries as a kid, I would see these amazing European paintings, and I’m like, ‘Wow, these are amazing,’ but there’s no one that looks like me,” he said, of his desire to focus on portraiture.

“Francis R. of City College”

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

The subject of “Francis R. of City College,” Mitchell’s painting featured in the Edwards’ dining room in “Forever,” is modeled after his father. For Mitchell, the work represents a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Making the painting in his Baltimore studio less than a mile away from City College, where his father attended high school, felt like a full-circle moment.

Seeing the work on television only adds to the significance.

“One of my goals is to always promote those who work in ink because it’s not a traditional medium,” he said, pointing to tattoo artists Jun Cha and Mister Cartoon as inspirations. “So for it to be seen on television, it lends credence to, ‘Hey, we’re doing something special as well.’”

Edwin Marcelin, 50

Marcelin’s first job as a teenager was at Stüssy, a Laguna Beach streetwear brand founded in the early 1980s. Minimalist graphic design, a trademark of Stüssy as well as brands Supreme and Undefeated, has always informed his art.

“Everything usually is about engagement, confrontation or affection,” said Marcelin. “Those are things that I tend to generate towards by using very minimal strokes.”

During his time at the California College of the Arts — then called the California College of Arts and Crafts — Marcelin was drawn to Bauhaus, a German school of art that melds functionality and design. Marcelin applies those abstract Bauhaus fundamentals and adds the element of movement.

“If it ain’t moving, it ain’t me,” said the L.A.-born-and-raised artist.

Marcelin said his emphasis on motion lends itself well to the screen — his piece “Clarity,” a dynamic painting of Michael Jordan taking flight, hangs in basketball-loving Justin’s bedroom in “Forever.”

“I think Black folks in Los Angeles are dynamic, so I try to keep dynamic images, people doing things, not standing there, and I think that translates to film very well,” said Marcelin.

“Clarity” is part of a 23-painting series titled “Black Jesus.” Each image in the series, which took Marcelin about five months to complete in its entirety, references Jordan, who Marcelin said is disappearing visually from pop culture. Case in point: He said his 19- and 16-year-old sons may recognize the Jumpman logo, but they wouldn’t instantly recognize an image of Jordan himself.

“There’ll be more basketball players, but I wanted to do something that was completely abstract representing him because he has so many moments that are fantastically beautiful,” said Marcelin.

Corey Pemberton, 34

With a background in collage, glassblowing and painting, Pemberton’s large mixed-media works — of a man singing into his toothbrush in the bathroom, a naked woman smoking marijuana in bed, a man devouring a plate of his mother’s food — are both intimate and mundane.

“At a certain point, I turned an interest to those who had been marginalized by society in some way, whether it was because of the color of their skin or their gender expression or their socioeconomic status, and developed an interest in depicting those people in a way that both celebrated them but also gave them some space to just exist,” he said.

Such themes of ownership and viewership are etched into Pemberton’s work. For example, he depicts the space and objects around his figures in vivid detail. Objects are important, he said, because they carry memories of “the people who created them or gave them to us or lived with them before us.”

Similarly, his painting “The Collector” celebrates “a young black person who’s making a concerted effort to own and conserve our culture, which is so often falling into the hands of people who don’t care about us on a deeper level.” And in many of Pemberton’s pieces, miniature renderings of his previous works can be found on the walls of his subjects’ homes.

“I think when you see a work presented that way, it sort of brings a heightened level of importance,” said Pemberton.

“I Used to Cook More”

(Corey Pemberton)

So it’s doubly significant that Pemberton’s work is on display in the wealthy Edwards’ home in “Forever.” The art in question, “I Used to Cook More,” can be found in the family’s kitchen and depicts Pemberton’s friend and fellow collector Jared Culp eating out of a white takeout container.

“We were talking about all of the takeout that we now consume as busy young Black creatives in L.A. trying to claw our way to the top of something,” said Pemberton.

But success in the art world has been easier to come by in L.A., where he relocated to after six years in rural North Carolina, said Pemberton.

“When I moved to Los Angeles, not only was I selling work but I was selling work to people with shared experience,” he said. “I was getting feedback that not only were these works that people wanted to live with, but they were works that people saw themselves reflected in, and that I was doing something important or meaningful to more people than just myself.”

Charles A. Bibbs, 77

Bibbs worked in corporate America for 25 years before becoming an artist full time. For Bibbs, art — in a crosshatching style, in his case — is all about communicating universal ideas.

“I mix that crosshatching with different colors and paint, and it’s just one layer on top of another until you get your desired effect,” Bibbs said of his “spontaneous” way of creating that’s “almost like magic sometimes.”

Like many Black artists, Bibbs chose his subject matter out of necessity. As a young man, he encountered few Black artists, yet innately understood the power of positive images of the Black experience, especially in the home.

“It’s a very honorable occupation because you’re giving people a part of you that is changing their lives in an aesthetic way,” he said. “All of those things play into people proud to be who they are.”

“Daddy’s Love”

(Charles A. Bibbs)

In “Forever,” viewers may catch a glimpse of “Daddy’s Love,” a drawing of Bibbs’ father and Bibbs and his sister as children, on the wall outside Justin’s bedroom. But this isn’t the first time his work has made it to the screen. Bibbs is credited with the Black Madonna artwork on the honey jar central to the plot of the 2008 film “The Secret Life of Bees.” He said the experience underscored the importance of art, which he said touches the “subconscious mind.”

“[My work] was part of the presentation of the movie and in some way or another may have helped them understand what that movie was really all about.”