![]() drawl, elongating the first syllable so that it sounds like "Baaah-skee-aht." As he talks, he stands in front of five of his own paintings, three of which recently sold to collectors across the country. "They didn't have any Black artists in here before me, besides Basquiat," Flowers says with a thick D.C. (Flowers is a lifelong practicing Muslim.) The gallery's slogan - "Placing 20th century modern masters within the reach of art lovers of all levels" - is on full display in its intimate, two-room space, where works from icons like Basquiat, Warhol, and Damien Hirst hang on the walls.įlowers dons a long beard and a prayer bump on his forehead, a dark callus that's developed after years of morning prayers. It's one of the many galleries around the world where Flowers' work is displayed. On a September morning this year, Flowers, his wife Lauren McKinney, and their 1-year-old daughter Nala gather at the DTR Modern Gallery in Georgetown, posing for portraits. That teenager, Halim Flowers, now a 41-year-old author, poet, and visual artist based out of D.C. The footage is over two decades old, a scene taken from HBO's Thug Life in D.C., an Emmy-winning documentary by Mark Levin and Daphne Pinkerson that came out in 1999. I can't win," he says, looking away from the reporter and the camera. He responds to her with a depressing calculation: if he were to end up serving a 30-year sentence, his mother would likely be dead by the time he was released. The kid fidgets with his pants while shirtless men play basketball behind him, and the reporter peppers him with questions about his future. A dark-suited reporter asks him whether anyone he knew growing up in his neighborhood "made it out." One person, he responds. There's a grainy, '90s-era video on YouTube that shows a 16-year-old Black kid in an oversized white T-shirt, prisoner No.
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