Wayne R. Goodman has had solo shows and won several awards for his work and the 71-year-old said the sudden attention is a surprise, especially as he didn’t even think about exhibiting his work until 2016.

 

“My heart is racing, it still seems surreal,” he said. “Every day I’m waking up and I'm just like, ‘Oh man, what's next?’ It's just been unbelievable, man, unbelievable. And certainly, I'm grateful.”

 

Goodman's "Storyville" exhibition was shown during Black History Month, February 2022 in the Maudee Carron Gallery (TASI) and then won First Place the following month, March 2022 TASIMJAE art show, the result of which was another one-man show, “Storyville,” May 2023, Main Gallery of The Art Studio, Inc., Beaumont, TX. 

 

Drawing was not completely absent from Goodman’s life — he earned an associate degree in drafting from Lamar University. But it wasn’t until 2012 that he began to create his visual stories. He was drawing on the floor with young family members and one of the girls asked him for a specific image.

 

“She said, ‘Uncle Wayne, I want you to draw a picture with nothing but girls, no boys,” he said, laughing. “That’s the one I call ‘Girl Power.” Everything's pink. One child, she's drawing the hopscotch board on a concrete floor on the basketball court. That kind of kicked me off.

 

“I guess she contracted me to do that, and from that point on, I started just doing a lot of other little drawings with several other children.”

 

He entered his first exhibition at the Beaumont Art League and won first place for his piece “Maple Sugar Child,” based on a poem by Langston Hughes. Ironically, given his love of books, Goodman’s drafting career came about because he fell out with his high school English teacher and walked out of her class and into the drafting class. He said he was hooked from that point.“The principal came in one day and said, Mr. James, we're gonna let him stay in this class, he's going to be absent from his English class,” Goodman said. “From that point on, they had an agreement, OK, let Wayne be. I wasn't rowdy or violent or anything like that.”