Bill Cottman knew in his teens that he wanted to be an artist. But as a young Black man in a segregated high school in Salisbury, Maryland, seven miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, he didn’t get a lot of encouragement.
“That’s not a statement about our teachers and our guidance people,” he said earlier this week. “They were doing everything they could to put us on paths that would allow us to support ourselves and our families. Art was like, ‘Are you crazy?’”