Selden Gallery 2008, Sept. 5 – Sept. 26 “Hope Springs Eternal”, a joint exhibition with Donald Wilson
Selden Gallery 2015 exhibiting artist “Art of African American Artists” curated by Maizelle
Offsite Gallery June 28 – August 9, 2019 “Make Me Wanna Holler”, curated by Maizelle
I am concerned with the condition of humanity. Several years ago, while teaching at an over populated public high school in Prince George’s County Maryland, serving as a youth director at a small church in a depressed neighborhood in Southeast, Washington D. C., and teaching evening classes in an affluent neighborhood in Old Town Alexandria Virginia I witnessed the societal damages rendered to our youth due to neglect and misinformation. Those experiences impressed upon me life’s fragility and the desperate need for meaningful work to engage the youth that I was serving. I grew tired of the literal and statistical demise of the youth and witnessing adults who were either afraid of the children or had given up on them. Thus, the foundation of my work was borne on the philosophy of the “creative process as an alternative to violence.”
My work challenges viewers to ponder the various constraints found in popular culture that limit our freedom, and erode our sense of history, morality and ethics. I use the ancient process of block-printing in the form of Linoleum Cuts. I am intrigued by the multiplicity of marks, textures and patterns that can be achieved in the process. Within those abstractions I am able to house oral traditions, mythological stories, Biblical truths, symbolism and history. The improvisation and syncopation embodied in Jazz and Hip Hop musical idioms collide in my work to create a didactic universal and contemporaneous vocabulary.
My love for drawing is evident within my oeuvre and it serves as the foundation of my creative process and output. I utilize a dense-pack design mechanism to alter viewer response timing. My audience must sift through the image to reveal its deeper meaning beyond the aesthetics of form to understand its function. This notion lies in opposition to our microwave culture, while at the same time mimics it because we are bombarded with several streams of information daily. Ideally, my work operates to arrest my audience to return again and again to plant a seed in the heart of mankind to evoke change in the human condition.
