Artist Statement

A lot of my work centers around my girls and how they are growing up. Raising children of color here has a special set of joys and challenges. Childhood, as a stage, is very short and is exponentially shorter for black and brown kids. I try to capture the rapidly passing moments of their growth while also trying to maintain their fleeting girlhood as long as I can. I also just appreciate standing in the beauty that surrounds black girls and women as a whole.

Bio

Art has always been a huge part of my life. When I was a small child, my grandmother would keep all of her paper grocery bags for me to draw on. While in elementary school, I watched Bob Ross every day after school and tried my best to copy him. As I got older my mother noticed that art was something that was going to be a part of me, so she began to encourage it. I enrolled in art classes after school and on weekends. She took me to galleries and museums. In high school, all of my electives were art related. After graduation, I went on to spend a year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Though I only stayed for my foundation year, the experience at SAIC had a huge impact on me as an artist. My confidence grew and my willingness to experiment with styles and mediums flourished. After leaving SAIC, I returned home to St. Louis for a couple of years where I taught after school art classes to kids in my neighborhood and drew regularly on my own. My focus during this time was graphite and colored pencil realism and figurative work. Soon life took me in a completely different direction and I moved to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. Living there immersed me in an environment that was both familiar and completely foreign. It was the first time that I’d ever lived in a place where I was not a minority. The beauty of the land and culture impacted my art in a huge way. I began to combine my willingness to experiment with styles and mediums with portraiture of people around me. This was when I really began to paint. In my time on St. Croix, I got married and had three children. My children added a new element to my artistic style and subject matter. Watching their growth and development as well as their innocence and sense of wonder touched a part of me that had not been visited since my own childhood. Capturing that innocence and intensity became the main focus of my work. When I was pregnant with my fourth child, we relocated from St. Croix and settled in Mississippi where my experiences were both familiar and foreign. Today, I live in the South, where raising four black girls is both a gift and a challenge. Just like in the Virgin Islands the land and the people influence my life and work the most. My work captures the dreaminess of southern landscapes as a backdrop to black childhood that is pure and uninterrupted. My children and their real-life experiences are often the subjects of my paintings. The need to capture the reality of their specific childhood and the freedom that comes with it is one that drives me continuously. It is essential that the work illuminates and illustrates an often under-recognized narrative: that black childhood is as important and as beautiful as every other child’s.

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