But some of it is true
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But Some of it is True is an exploration of Black diasporic oral traditions—their forms, functions, and lineages. The project examines the utility of storytelling as a tool for encoding, storing, and sharing knowledge across generations and posits an alternative creative/intellectual ecosystem that predates and runs parallel to contemporary Eurocentric ideological frameworks. The body of work includes Quack Quack Motherfucker, white men with guns that want to kill me, and Souls of Black Folx. In the exhibition, the ducks are a mashup of the Sankofa bird and racist depictions of Black people popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries. The project explores diasporic memory, violence as performance/ entertainment, and souvenirs and other comfort objects in terms of maintaining and navigating racial history. In white men with guns that want to kill me, the caricaturization of police (and fascists) as pigs and expands it to include a variety of violent white supremacists. The body of work is a mix of cartoons and research documents underscoring my relationship to the white men in question. Lastly, I discuss Souls of Black Folx. Here, the bar offers speculative afterlife for Black people to relax. Alter and offering. When I discuss "The Oral Tradition," I’m describing the foundations of a system of knowledge production and storage. This system, while rooted in the spoken word, has blossomed into the kaleidoscopic cultural production of Black people—music, fashion, visual art, cuisine, dance, lexicon, etc.—that is at the core of U.S. culture, albeit severely under-acknowledged, and is consumed the world over. I cannot rely on a framework or methodology that, at best, has a blind spot concerning my context, and has actively worked to discredit, ignore, or bury it to describe or explore said context. I have repeatedly been asked where my work fits in the art historical context and I have struggled to come up with an answer that felt right. I could place it neatly in the lineage of Romare Bearden, Faith Ringold, Basquiat, and Nick Cave but that feels like forcing my work into a box that was never meant to hold it. (I would imagine some of the above artists felt similarly) While I do take inspiration from these artists and comfort from the community at a distance, I think this overlooks an important part of the question: What is "the art historical context"? What does it value and whom does it serve? What happens when we decenter European-derived thought/ opinion? I have more important things to do with my time than argue with white people.
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M.F.A