I want everyone to be free.

 

Community work, historical inquiry, lived experience, ancestral memory, and premonition are the primary sources of my practice.

 

I have been an artist all my life though I spent years believing I hadn’t inherited the wealth or bloodline for it. I have learned from histories of incarceration, self-sufficiency, global dynamics of social order based on gender, race, and class and the formation of citizenship and sub-citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, extraction and exploitation, the potential of collective trust and cooperation. There is always a risk of grave loss when treating something very real as an object of intellectual study. My experiences in revolutionary protest, community organizing, and justice work have proved more significant to me than anything else.

 

I’ve been tear-gassed, assaulted by police. I’ve walked prison yards and dorm halls cracking jokes and listening close to stories of abuse whispered with fear. Conversations with those without homes have been a joy of my life on both coasts and in-between, where I’ve given as much as I’ve been given. 

 

I spent 2021 on the road from NYC to LA, traveling down the east coast, through the south all over Texas, up to Wyoming and down to California. Snow capped pines to backroad gators to jazz and beignets to no one around for 30 miles again and again and again. DJ Screw tapes in the truck. Ropes and bridge leaps into the creek, the same kind my grandfather knew growing up in sharecropping Virginia, where he and his friends got picked up to go work on a vanilla plantation. Mountaintop sleep, the fox in the rain with thunder rolling in. Streets that are the same everywhere. A motorcycle rev symphony. Million year old rocks. Shapes, sounds, textures, temperatures that remind us we’re on a planet we’re on a planet we’re on a planet. The loss of my grandfather.

 

Through my work I tell my story. I learn to be vulnerable. I got out of the mud in Utah’s salt flats with my life on the line - to save myself. I make things to achieve the same.

 

State-sponsored, systematic, and social violence compound our universal struggles with the shadows of pain and traumatic events.  We have to face those things. My family had to survive. The pressure I feel to self-actualize is a privilege. I draw strength from a familial and cultural history of resistance, from the Black radical tradition, from a biological imperative to create freedom for all of us together. 

 

As a child I saw and experienced domestic violence, and I’ve witnessed racism and sexism in New York courts, streets, schools, and prisons through my daily life, education, and work.

 

Now I make maps of personal and collective experience past, present, and future. I paint them primarily on large frames that I build myself in a process that is sacred to me. And I remember my grandfather working on his house in the south. It is a dance.

 

My maps are often colorful and dense. There are twists, hiding spots, and secrets buried under additive layers of irreversible cosmic sedimentation like the million-year-old rocks in West Texas and California. Okay - sometimes just layers of oil paint whose ochres are sourced from those same rocks. I write poems in the margins and include the beasts that duck and bob across the water. Maps are a portrait of the time, no? I trace the zeitgeist across the topography. 

 

Words, shapes, emotional ruptures, diagrammatic reference material, deep-seated feelings from the past, and visions of the future are bases of my work. I have painted figures and places months before I ever encountered them, only then understanding where they came from. Some things I have seen as visions I am sure I will never confront in this lifetime. But I have seen them in a past life or one that is still to come and of this I am certain down to my bones.

 

Maybe we all share generational trauma by virtue of sharing the spaces that have seen it all through millennia; intimacy and violence, incarceration and liberation side-by-side. I know ‘it’ is in the air because I feel it. I know you do too.

 

A goal of my work is to expose these layers in time and to sculpt a mirror from them. Look! Look at what we have built, how it affects us in at least four dimensions. Accept how staring it in the face makes you feel, beautiful being with the power to change it all.

 

May my work leave you more empathetic, encouraged to spend time with yourself and realize that when we respect ourselves we cannot go out of our way to harm others. 

 

Themes in my practice include personal and collective identity formation, the way history is told and remembered/disremembered, surveillance and control, the commodification of human experience, the transformation of everything into pornography, and loss of self / degradation of self-image through media. 

 

Every person on earth deserves confidence in their birthright to practice making, and grow from the affirming, deeply complex process that it is. 

 

As a teacher my pedagogy is to encourage others to trust themselves and those around them, and to believe in our personal and collective ability to understand and achieve liberation. In contributing something new, we encounter our shortcomings; technical, financial, communicative. “I don’t know how to say this” or show it, shape it, give it the same essence on canvas or in clay that I see and feel when I think about it. It is a miraculous and always necessary exercise to express our joys, love, frustrations… all that captivates us at any age. And when we allow ourselves to be expressive, we naturally face the shadows of trauma – personal, collective, and inter-generational – that affect us through memory just as much as they do through feelings we can’t name or source. 

 

We can’t run from the past or from present circumstance – especially not as children, often frustrated by the lack of control we have as youth over the always challenging and sometimes scary routines of daily life, family, and the social/physical environments we navigate at home, school, and everywhere in between. It is easy to talk about self-care and reflection, but we must be safe in order to meditate on and reflectively process our feelings of fear, loss, and confusion alongside our excitement and pleasures in a way that gives us clarity. We are then called to trust in order to share our feelings and the products of our reflection in a way that is visible to our spirits and to others. 

 

Safety to be vulnerable and confidence to trust are elements of liberation and equity that are often missing from conversations about justice. 

 

There is a crisis of confidence affecting youth of color, promoted by the dominant systems of inequality and media reverberation. 

 

Children deserve a safe environment to be vulnerable, and in vulnerability to be free, trusting, and open to trying. Youth are often scared of not knowing, and meet it with anger and dismissal. Underneath it all lies a real sense of ‘I don’t know this and I don’t trust myself to be able to know it, so why try’.  Inequality instills this thought process in young people. Making art requires that we reject our fear of trying and embrace the process of learning – about ourselves and how our voice looks in different forms, of new techniques and histories, how to communicate who we are, what we stand for, and what being us and others looks like. We can speak, write, paint, sculpt, weave, and perform our meaning, to name only a few ways to lay bare how we process the world and the things that happen to us. Making art is a tool of self-expression and reflection on personal and collective experience. Art is an instrument of war. 

 

By documenting the world and things that happen, how those things affect us, what they do to our bodies and minds that must process them… we reject personal and collective erasure. We stand up for ourselves. In making, we feel ourselves in our own bodies, in control. What a privilege.

 

To trust in ourselves when society tells us we are not to be trusted, that we do not know best, that we need to consume something outside of ourselves in order to be whole… to look inward and draw it out, to declare our experience and our thoughts about it - our mode of processing it, our perspective, our ideas, our voice - to declare all that worthy of expression, to put it into material form, to say no to everything that tells us to keep it inside if we ever even allow ourselves to see the vastness of our interiority and subjectivity in the first place. This is radical work. This is resistance at the highest level. This is assertion of self. This is saying our life matters. Everyone is an artist. “Society beats the wings off angels”. We all are haunted by insecurity. Making says fuck it all we are here and we matter and I’m not giving up until we are all free. This is my life’s work. I do it for my people, for my culture, to make space for everyone who ever felt like they couldn’t do something they wanted to because it wasn’t for them, who ever felt out of place for not knowing the codes of high society, who couldn’t afford to keep up with the trends, who begged mom for a new pair of shoes because they wanted to fit in, who ever felt alone, who didn’t grow up on the love we see in movies, whose stomach turned trying to understand why so many people on earth are hurting all the time, who ever felt the gut wrenching anger of trying to understand why they want to keep taking taking taking taking taking from us, stop trying to kill me and my people, we are here to stay and we will make space for each other on the path to freedom. One love.