CREATIVE COMMUNITY CARE VIRTUAL RESIDENCY

For Such is the Kingdom is a series of portraits and murals featuring children. It stems from my work as a facilitator at Rikers Island and my interactions with the young people that are detained there. I am truly interested in the notion of innocence, especially black innocence. I am also interested in the potential that each child carries. Testify is a photographic and sound based public art project that highlights testimonies from the year 2020.  Phase one of the project features portraits of individuals selected by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice’s Youth Council. Each youth council member will conduct audio interviews with each subject in order to capture their testimony. Testify will be installed on the fences of basketball courts, public housing, empty lots, construction sites and other facades and will span across all five boroughs.

By photographing sacred spaces and through a contemporary poetic response to the patriarchs of the Old Testament, I examine what it means to redefine which spaces and communities are considered sacred. I work in various communities throughout North Carolina and South Carolina including different faith traditions, skateboarding parks, abandoned mills and warehouses with street art. Through interviews with clergy, skaters, graffiti artists, barbers and stylists, I gain a better understanding of the intersection of these communities.

My project participates in my own community of the United Northwest (Indianapolis), which is on the edge of being gentrified. It is a primarily black and brown, low wealth community. It’s also where greatness unseen exists. I build on the relationships with residents to help them see they are needed, their gifts, talents, and contributions will be celebrated. It builds relationships by connecting people with stories, which normally wouldn’t be connected and seen.

The goal of what I’m calling the larger ongoing East Side Chapel Revival Project is simple: Revival, in the spiritual, civic, and cultural sense, of this chapel in Corsicana’s historic East Side neighborhood for present and future generations. My goal is to implement the first stage in the preservation and activation process. This involves a two to three-month community video and oral history project culminating in an interpretive installation inside East Side Chapel. The working title for the oral history and installation is “Stained Glass Stories.” This project involves three different elements of creative practice: storytelling and oral history, video documentary & photography, and art installation & historical interpretation.

This project explores the intersection of environmental and relational sustainability through gift giving. Over 6 months in 2021, I made crafts out of the plastic wrappers, old fabrics and other up-cycled materials that accumulated in my home over the height of the pandemic and gave them as gifts to friends and family. My aim was to keep myself grounded with a hands-on creative practice while tending to the relationships around me. I also hope to encourage community care as a mode of self care and to show the generative possibilities of simple acts of generosity.

Constellation is a project that began with individual conversations on grief, loss and hope with five friends.  The shared experience informed an artwork that attempted to hold these exchanges in memory.  The project eventually broadened by inviting a wider community into the exchange to share their own stories of loss on a virtual platform.  This widening of the conversation in turn shaped the artwork into a piece that held a greater collective history.  

In its visual form Constellation is a 5×8’ wall piece constructed from aluminum mesh with mixed media applied to the surface.  Names of those who have passed on into death or otherwise are written onto areas of the work.  These include names given from the original five participants that started this project.  And also include names submitted by the public through an online forum.  To present names across the work evokes the influence of those who are memorialized, bringing into focus their lives in the immediate moment.  

As Constellation is presented in different sites across the US, in-person visitors are invited to write names onto the artwork of whom they wish to remember. Accompanying stories were recorded in this project and are displayed to read on-site and an opportunity to leave one’s own story is available. Constellation acts both as a reflective encounter and an object that holds an active and on-going narrative. In engaging with remembrance the encouragement of hope and peace is offered.

This project brings together members of the Chinatown community to form Yarn Circles that create art and also discuss issues impacting the Asian American community. Crochet volunteers engage in the shared experience of spending time together over the course of 3-5 months and contribute individual pieces of art towards the creation of a large-scale art piece to beautify their neighborhood with a meaningful civic message.

My initial project was to focus on the manger of Jesus and ask questions of the people in the installation about the “mangers” in their lives, with the hopes of helping them attune their gaze more closely to God’s unexpected activity in their communities. But that initial hope turned into Notes of Rest, a full-blown spiritual retreat that interweaves Scriptural meditations and solo piano music to cultivate rest, contemplation and creativity for communities listening for Jesus’ call. Each retreat session is tailored to the community at hand, be it a local church, a theological education institution, or an affinity group such as lawyers, artists, or food lovers. In all of these settings, my aim is to help sensitize people more so to the ways they are already being formed so that the Church might more imaginatively serve this present age. Now my HUB project is Notes of Rest for the Mangers, meaning I am creating a small Notes of Rest session for people looking to attend to the mangers in their lives.

Notes from Scripture. Notes of music. Notes for community. Notes of Rest.