When it comes to Black people, America is fascinated with extreme poles: either showing victims of violence, pain, and poverty (Black misery) or famous athletes and entertainers, and icons of popular culture (Black exceptionalism). This false dichotomy denies Black people the individuality and full spectrum of humanity that is so readily offered to the white population in this country. The photographs that I’ve been making ask the question: where are the people who make up space in between? Here they are, they are important, they must be seen!
Cuts and Beats is the title of a body of work in which I subvert historical images. Like publicity stills from Black artists in the Vaudeville and Minstrel era, by transforming them using techniques of photo collage, installation, and performance combined with my photographs. I think of this process of cutting, altering, reassembling, and bringing images into different contexts as a metaphor for the complex histories of Black Americans. The newly built images, look back to often racist representations, and much like memory, recede to a current, self-possessed, and subversive imagery, each influencing and dictating to the other, serving as a remix of past and present culture.”
The Heat of the Cool emerged from a theory that espouses the idea that cool or coolness is a West African phenomenon where its inhabitants mask a deep wellspring of intensity, stress, or pleasure with serenity, calmness, or spirituality. Believing in the transformative power of dance I create, parties, dances, and occurrences of movement, where participants (dancers) and collaborators (DJs, still and motion photographers) converge. From these events, I create large-scale photographs and time-based imagery that renders the moving, dancing body as a symbol of freedom, with the ability to express the ownership of one’s time, space, labor, and self.
This multidiscipline project places at its center the photograph and the depiction of the moving, dancing body, as a divine symbol of freedom, with its own understanding of time, sometimes improvised, sometimes instructive. The body in motion is a lexicon of communication. The ecstatic experiences found in music and dance can be considered a momentary connection to the divine.
James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” serves as my inspiration for an artist residency in Lucerne, Switzerland. In this essay from Baldwin’s collected essays Notes of a Native Son (1955), Baldwin uses his encounters with the villagers as an occasion to ponder the whole history of Western white supremacy and racism, arguing that “the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” He weaves the narrative of how the stigma of being a Negro in the Unites States has followed him to the remote Swiss village, Loèche-les-Bains. This essay continues to resonate within me from my first reading in 1984 as a teen on the South Side of Chicago, struggling to find and establish my cultural and artistic identity to the present as a man, an artist and matured, yet still searching, questing and questioning. If Baldwin’s idea that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” then I must consider the notion that people and their histories can both inform and free each other, in order to move forward to form and construct meaningful narratives and nuanced histories.
Ritual is risk, leap, a pulling back of the curtain, the private life made public reveal. Against the current of the very essence of life, our subject is everywoman and everyman, she is deft of hand, resourceful, open, and free. She is a high wire act without a net, she is a reflection of our best selves lived well, loud, and proud.
In my role as an artist in residence, I moved about creating performance, political in scope, during the passing period of a large Chicago public High School. These performances were meant to instruct and inspire the student body in artistic labor and political protest. Pieta, or pity for the American flag and by extension the American condition.