CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – What do mythology, money and masculinity have in common? They’re examples of stories made real through our collective belief. And though they’re only ideas, their effects are real and lasting. Paintings of people have been key sites for negotiating issues of identity and educating cultural norms in society for centuries. We’ve learned to form meaning around people in part through the narratives, objects and images of a privileged few: from viewing black bodies as exotic or threatening, to reducing women to narrow aspects and fearing differing sexualities.
I’m curious about storytelling, the body in visual culture and subjects that explore the tensions between feeling and knowledge, power and violence, vulnerability and tenderness. My work examines personal and shared black experiences, and offers stories that expand our understandings. I use allegories and portraits across painting, drawing and sculpture to explore cultural identity, emotion and family by layering existing histories with new narratives. My projects invite viewers to consider the tales we tell and how we express notions of gender and race today.
In 2015, I began my recent project “Birth Throes” after helping my mother through a stroke that limited her communication, and feeling beaten by the ceaseless reminders of how little black lives matter in America. I reflected on my mother’s diminished voice and how I’ve survived despite statistics, and broadly asked myself, “Who carries our family’s stories and where are they culturally remembered?”
Black American families exemplify innovation, rebellion and hope, defined through intergenerational acts of survival against institutional injustice. Too often, though, they’ve been framed by nonblack authors as destructive, unloyal and broken, and used to inflict cycles of incarceration, negligence, terrorism and killing. “Birth Throes” focuses on my family as a case study, using delivery, death and prophecy as rhetorical devices, and looks at black familyhood’s capacity to traverse fear, tragedy and joy, and to enrich culture.
My painting “Untimely ripp’d” (2017), for example, brings together many of these ideas. It pictures my mother and a team of surgeons delivering me via cesarean section in an operating room. This fusion connects the cultural and critical valuing of black life – in particular its premature ending – through depicting the business of its beginning.
This scene of five female surgeons and mother bearing new life dialogues with male-dominated paintings like Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic” (1875), and expands examples of medical professionals and women in art.
The title is a reference to the cesarean-born character Lord Macduff from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” who would foil the tyrant Macbeth would become. This allusion makes room to consider the coming black body as a symbol of hope or a caution, depending on one’s vantage.
When I was young, my parents encouraged my drawing and exposed me to black excellence through books, TV and artists in my dad’s record collection like Sly and the Family Stone. My mom worked for the Southern New England Telephone Company and dad worked as a city foreman and gravedigger. I wanted to be an illustrator or animator, and learned about art through Saturday-morning cartoons, school field trips, “Sesame Street” and “Reading Rainbow.”
I grew up in Connecticut and South Carolina, in mostly white communities, and rarely encountered creative endeavors by people who looked like me or shared similar experiences outside of the home. I wasn’t introduced to black visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Romare Bearden until college.
I began studying to become a K-12 art teacher but shifted to studio art after learning how well I connected with others through my art. As a professor and artist, the university’s support helps me find the time and resources to research and connect with underrepresented ideas, groups and leaders, and to nurture greater numbers of these voices into positions than there were when I started.
Years ago, a group of young black art students attended an opening reception of my work in a city where the black people have been historically dismissed, ignored and disproportionately persecuted. Watching those students react to seeing themselves reflected in my work and talking with them later about what it meant to them gives me life and keeps me inspired in the studio and classroom.
Art, media and culture have grown more inclusive and more intractable since my childhood. Despite good efforts, expansive examples of underrepresented authors and subjects are still limited in public consciousness and education. When students walk into my classrooms, my body is littered with stories that are not mine, informed chiefly through representations of black masculinity in media. Through my art courses, students encounter difference and learn empathy for others. Meeting our land-grant mission, they learn how to be creative thinkers, critics and community leaders who carry an important role in representing society’s life cycle. My presence in art and on this campus reframes imbedded narratives by providing the communities with a personal account and differing ideas.
I just completed a portrait of Albert R. Lee – an African American man who deeply affected our community – commissioned by U. of I. Chancellor Robert Jones. Lee was hired in 1897 and rose to the position of chief clerk in the president’s office, serving under seven presidents. On top of his official duties, Lee helped black students find housing in the homes of black community members and get jobs. His work helped them become leaders in their fields and enhanced their well-being on campus.
When the chancellor asked me for this portrait, I spent weeks thinking through compositions that could tell Lee’s story. I collected black-and-white photos of him and personal accounts from his biographer, Vanessa Rouillon. With so few pictures of Lee from his time, and none in color, I wanted his portrait to feel fresh, and as if he lived today. I worked to bring his likeness into full color and avoided traditional formats. After deciding to focus on a large close-up of his head with a rich royal blue color palette, I began the five-month process of completing the large-scale portrait.
I look forward to sharing it during the unveiling ceremony in the Student Dining and Residential Programs Building, where the portrait will reside. Portraits like Lee’s, painted by artists like him, supported by institutions like us, help expand the stories and authors that we encounter and expect in our daily lives. These gestures add significantly to telling a coherent story from our time, and inspire others to explore and share their rare and valuable stories.