Artists Biographies
"In that painting, The Night is Our Friend, you have two subjects that are resting on the other side of the wall because light is coming from an opportunity – the other side... but the two subjects aren’t bothered by being in the shadows."
"I made Mayhem No. 2 – it originally started off as an all black painting with just bullets, and I sat on it for probably a week and I was like ‘well I don’t feel like it’s finished.’ So I sat down and starting doing more research about everything that was going on at the time and I was researching statistics of police brutality on African diaspora bodies and I was like ‘well, I’m going to use that research and use it on this Mayhem No. 2."
"Underneath the color bars that are also associated with my childhood and a time when TV had a limit into our lives lays various revolutions throughout history that we only read about: The American Revolution, The French Revolution, The Haitian Revolution, The Chinese Revolution, The Russian Revolution and all the revolutions including Civil Rights and the Black Panther Movement."
"Any discrimination of you, you know it. And that is why you will even react too quick to it as well. But what we also are not bringing out is the beautiful culture that Black people have. The visionaries, the engineers, the doctors – all of those people that are bringing that dignifying image within the Black communities. The images that we wish to live with within our home that can educate the next generation, that can make them be proud of who they are."
"The work is very confrontational and it’s intentional because you’re talking about a group of women who have been marginalized throughout history. And when I think of them, to me they’re saying, “you will feel my presence, you will know me, you will know my name.” And for me, size does that."
"The people in the paintings are ordinary people, but they still allude that strength – that power. So I want my audience to know that each and every one of us has that power."
"Ultimately, it is about the range of human expression. It’s about giving Black figures the ability to have that range. To not be secluded to one emotion – to one look. It’s the body that can inhabit all of these things. It’s also just the story of humanity. But specifically, in the Black body, to have that one thing on the side that’s always lurking, but to also think about happiness. To think about completing your cartwheel!"
"The scene becomes very terrestrial with any notion of the metaphysical hidden within the figure. The suggestion (possibly implied by the UFO print on her socks) is that the possibilities of fantastic transformations can be internal."
“My life’s work is about an uncovering. My life and artwork are an uncovering to try and reclaim a dignity that literally through forgetting, through it being beaten out of you…revolves around my blackness, my queerness, and my very close affiliation and allyship with the feminine experience. That’s where my story comes from. It is my politics. It grooms everything around me.”
"These paintings are an examination of the humanity of Black people in America. I choose to look at that from the perspective of children particularly focusing on the hand games of children, call and response, because that has always been something has kept Black people going."