PAINTING
EXHIBITS
&
SOUND
PERFORMANCES

Reading about Ceremonies, rituals, folk tales, mythologies, and ghost stories from around the world was my childhood escape route. Today, these traditional narratives reveal themselves as survival manuscripts – the last fragments of my heritage still intact. The way these stories use humor and emotion to guide us to truths is the primary inspiration behind my paintings. My work examines many lost, untold, and violently repressed diasporic memories, exploring themes of pain, love, and ceremonial return to roots - creating space for both healing and reclamation of identity and spiritual body.

Through my artistic practice, I excavate beyond conventional narratives of American Blackness, investigating:

1. BURIED HISTORIES OF MY CAREGIVERS’ TRAUMA

2. ANCESTRAL ECHOS OF COLONIAL SYSTEMS STILL ATTEMPTING TO DESTROY THE RESURGENCE OF INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS

3. FORGOTTEN WISDOMS AND CEREMONIES THAT SURVIVED ALONGSIDE MEMORIES OF GENERATIONAL PAIN 

To get to the bottom of each of these, I am required to decenter the Whiteness that designed my Blackness.

I challenge colonization's fundamental mechanism of silencing: 

✤ NOBODY LIKES WHEN PEOPLE ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS!
✤ GOD WANTS IT TO BE LIKE THIS, DONT QUESTION GOD!
✤ DONT ASK ME ABOUT YOUR FATHER, I DONT KNOW HIM!

The foundation of colonization is abuse of power and dishonesty so insidious, it is inherited by new generations as blissful ignorance.

Colonialism destroyed the concept of ceremony practiced by different cultures, replacing it with entropic, imperialist-bred capitalism. Ceremony marked order (no speaking to kings without libations), rites of passage (birth, boyhood/girlhood, marriage, death), and honoring ones own body and soul (flower baths, plant medicine, music circles). A culture’s ceremonies indicate the depth of their world-building by how defined their identites and beliefs are in a real and spirutally dimensional terrotiry. Without ceremony, the connection to culture is lost.

Special thanks to Antoinette Cooper for her insight and thoughtful guidance in shaping this space.