Artist Bio + Statement

As a queer African-American visual artist, my artwork explores the trials, progress, and struggles of the black man and his family. While reacquainting with my youth in the Midwest, I developed a series of work that looks at young black children, reminiscent of my youth. These images explore the entirety of their conflicts, fears, and accomplishments. I create art from these emotional experiences from my past youth that is reflected in the images I capture in the paintings of families and children.

I find inspiration for my work in current events, notably those in devastation and distress, but also in the triumphs and achievements of notable black individuals. I want the viewer to create a dialogue between themselves and the subject painted, as the viewer begins to explore their interpretation of the subject’s story of trepidation and success within today’s society.

Sometimes I find myself confused in the midst of celebrating a conformed and confined version of liberation. One that is to humble and to quiet the riot inside of us. We have a moment of seeing our progress and at the same time, shutting us up because we should be grateful we’re not where we used to be. As if we’re not being killed now, as if we haven’t been killed then, as if we aren’t been targeted in this moment. We consistently endure the rewriting of history and slowly but surely, we forget and we keep moving on until it all boils over again. These works are about refreshing our memory. When we are analyzing and learning history, we learn in compartmentalization. Black history vs American history, or Eurocentric history, are discussed in a parallel and not necessarily in the way they’re realistically woven into one another. It’s almost as if when we learn, it’s to assume there is a basis of middle ground. But there isn’t. There is the oppressor and the oppressed, there is the ruling class and the working class and so on. ‘Where they ban books, they ban Bodies is a weave of patients from the first trans research institute built in 1919 in Tiergarten, Berlin. Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Gay physician where his institute became the worlds first research center on sexology, Hirschfeld was later forced into exile in France 1935, once the Nazis came into power. The institute was shut down three months after Nazi rule in 1933 and later the research from this center was destroyed. The image that is woven into the photograph is of Nazi book burning, a common way to rid the people of knowledge and ruled by fascism. This specific moment in history is a chilling foreshadowing of what we’re experiencing today. Censorship, banning, and the repeal of laws to strip away rights that don’t favor in centering white supremacy. The pig parade is a reminder that though they walk among us at our capitalist version of pride, where corporations add a rainbow onto their items, that it is the police who try to stop us from our liberation. And now that it’s become monumental we can’t allow it to be manipulated into a neoliberal version of freedom. Our liberation begins with us, and without us, there is no system.