I create paintings that remix narratives expressed within and instilled throughout Black America. My work searches for truth within surface and questions the unexamined histories across media, ranging from pigments made from food, paper towels, denim, and burlap. Having been a working chef for decades, I have always melded that world with my artistic practice, due to the intent they share about research into what can build and sustain a community.

 My interdisciplinary practice meets at the intersection of cultural myth-ologies, Critical Black Study, and Surrealism as a means of exploring methods in which physical, mental, and emotional states of being exist within and in opposition to the status quo. I work with the notion that society is monstrous to question themes of power, class, and the abject within their social, cultural, and political absurdities.

 My practice investigates the process of how we as individuals encounter our external reality and how that results in the interchangement between both. The mysterious space where they reshape each other is where my painting resides. William Kentridge said, “What one is doing in one’s own studio doesn’t sound like the same question as what is happening in the country but very often they are the same question.”

 As a painter native to the U.S./Mexico border, I explore narratives about my home city of Ciudad Juárez and its geographical, political, and cultural circumstances. I began painting during my teenage years when violence and corruption in Juárez peaked. As the city flooded with both, painting became a cathartic activity that gave me a sense of freedom I had never experienced.

 I am a visual storyteller capturing the intricate tales woven into the fabric of my subjects’ daily lives. Rooted in the principles of painting and drawing, my work is a tapestry shaped by the often overlooked narratives of the communities to which I belong. A native of New York, with a lineage that blends Southern and Jamaican heritage, I draw inspiration from the historical intricacies and layered complexities of the African diaspora.