My work is created in the African American tradition of paying homage to and celebrating respected historical figures who have paved the way for subsequent generations in music, dance, literature, and civil rights. Keeping our stories and images alive is important to me not only because it is a way to participate in the preservation of my cultural heritage, but also as a way to build community with contemporary artists similarly interested in representing the African diaspora.

I use traditional drawing tools like pen, brushes, sumi ink, and rough paper to illustrate stylistically proto-cubist portraits. I create starkly lit, highly modeled portraiture with embellishments of anxiously detailed and decorative textures that reference the weaving of textiles, used here as a secret metaphor for storytelling. I rely heavily on densely black structural forms and layered hatch marks over simple (yet marked) white negative space to highlight a quieter aspect of human emotion.

In my collection, I’ve arranged a pantheon of static, solemn, and serious people, stately and so solid. I startle the viewer into an earnest reading of the intense and carefully fixed eyes that stare back at them from the page, and coax them to understand a rougher imagery of sharp planes and hewn lines. Octavia Butler, depicted here, is an American author referred to as the godmother of Afrofuturism: the exploration of the past and future of Black culture in terms of technology and science in fictional works.

She created worlds involving time travel, the effects of catastrophic climate disruption, deconstructions of popular slavery narratives, and intimate human trajectories during a societal descent into dystopian hellscapes. The text on the image - “All That You Touch, You Change” - is lifted from Butler’s novel Parable of The Sower and is used there by her characters (in conjunction with other mantras) as mental preparation for an outer-earthly migration.