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Life
Ras Dizzy [Albert Livingstone] (1932-2008) was a Jamaican poet and visual artist. He also used the names Birth Lincoln and Dizzy Gillespie Johnson. He started to publish his poetry in the weekly journal Abeng published in 1969 (February 1 – September 27) in Kingston by university professors and intellectuals frustrated with the banning of Guyanese historian Walter Rodney from the University of the West Indies. At that time, Ras Dizzy was already painting and did so in a style referred to as intuitive, “primitive” or “naïve” by art historians. Dizzy is one of the most important self-taught visual artists of his generation, together with artists including Albert Zion, Evadney Cruickshank, Kingsley Thomas, Albert Artwell. Their artwork started to gain scholarly and media attention from the late 1970s.

Career
His work was part of the seminal exhibition The Intuitive Eye at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1979. His artwork was also exhibited widely in Jamaica and internationally. Fifteen Intuitives (1987) and Intuitives III (2005), two major exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica included his work, which was also featured in several of the Annual National and National Biennial exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica. Dizzy was first a poet, before becoming an itinerant artist. He started to self-publish and distribute his own poetry in Kingston and then started to travel across the country where he met many of the buyers for this artwork. His career as a poet started also by traveling around Jamaica. The focus of Ras Dizzy's paintings include Jamaican history, cowboy imagery, landscapes and spiritual undertones. His paintings sometimes feature writing, in a blend of both forms of artistic expression. He was also a Rastafari artist, and this is reflected in the religious and spiritual elements of his art in both poetry and painting, as well as in his lifestyle and philosophy.

Legacy and Papers
Ras Dizzy's archive is held at the National Library of Jamaica.