Dancing in the colors

This mixed media drawing was shown in the retrospective in Hoboken from December 2003 to January 2004. Here once again he refers to his Indian blood, the dances and the landscape albeit in a fairly abstract way. Some one on Steph's blog ' Reflexivity' wanted to know Tony's 'real name'. His birth name was Robert Lee Alderson. He disliked the name and all it signified to him. One of the reasons to take his stepfather's bastardized name (it had been turned around from Mafai to Mafia) was that it gave him a reason to distance himself from elements in his family he didn't like (a very severe uncle comes to mind who used to shave his ears when he was a still a small kid). The new name gave him a chance to reinvent himself. He was proud of his Indianess, the Irish and even the Dutch in his mother, but didn't feel comfortable with some of the Kentucky ways of doing things. To Tony, Tony Mafia was his name. Almost all his papers were in that name or carried it as 'Aka: also known as'.