The Cultural Traditions Inspiring Four Black Artists

How does food inspire your artistic process?

Cuisine and cookery have always served as my way to connect – there’s an intimacy to preparing and sharing in meals with another, to caring enough for someone to want to nourish them. How does one translate the cool-bitter snap of mint and dark chocolate into a painting? How about the briny-richness of uni? Or the raucous laughter between friends as rigatoni bobs and buoys in a saltwater boil? I ask these questions with each painting and through my practice work to synthesize the flavor palette of each dish with the emotional ambiance of these moments that I share with those I love.

Are there particular dishes or food traditions that influence your work?

Cooking a stew feels like an apt analogue to the studio process. Growing up in a household without recipes, you learn that, with a decent bit of know-how and good intuition, you can take an assortment of disparate ingredients and magnify them into excellence. Every painting starts with that ethos – I might have a few initial ideas of how to build the palette and where the painting might end up but the journey through requires a lot of improvisation and listening out for what each surface is requesting. With ample time and the kinetic “heat” that builds with each stroke, splatter and pour, these works simmer into unctuous chromatic stews.

By virtue of my practice I have the honor and, arguably, the responsibility to pull from a bevy of traditions. I am a Jamaican who was born in Brooklyn, so the dishes of my mother’s kitchen and those hot off the bodega griddle feel familiar in equal measure. With that as well, I’ve been able to visit Mexico City and Budapest and share in Chinese and Yemeni dishes alongside those who know those meals best. I think it’s vital for me to pay reverence to the various cuisines I’ve had the privilege to encounter and to allow each experience to serve as fresh links by which I can triangulate myself between the Caribbean and the Five Boroughs.

How do you see food as a form of storytelling and cultural preservation?

My mother and aunties came to this country in 1993, and I was born in ’95. They didn’t come with much in term of tangibles, but what they did have was a lifetime of recipes. Over the hundreds of Friday night dinners throughout my adolescence, I learned to cook by standing beside whoever was at the stove that given evening. I started by looking and listening deeply, then massaging browning into cuts of goat for stew and mixing batter for zucchini bread; I heard their careful instructions interspersed between nostalgic passages about home in Jamaica. Those evenings instilled a lifelong reverence for cookery to the point now that I have the lion’s share of my family’s dishes committed to memory – imbued within each dish, dozens of touchstone moments and memories across decades, across generations, and I have the honor to build onto that legacy going forward.

How do you think food and art intersect in Black culture?

I immediately think of Lords Bakery, a Nostrand Avenue institution which permanently closed last year. Home of the best red velvet cakes in the city by a mile. Their decadent ivory butter-creamed-garnet crumbed rounds were a staple at any family birthday or holiday of the last decade and a half. Lords red velvet epitomizes soul “food” for me – familiar, a feast for the eyes well before it meets your lips. When you see it, you can clearly see yourself within, when taken in, it reaches deeply like the warmth of an embracing hand pressed firmly against the back – be it food, be it art, this is the metric for what the aim is when it comes to sharing the bounties of ourselves.

How does spirituality influence your artistic practice?

So much of my foundation as a person is rooted in the teachings of the church. I am forever a church boy, and my art reflects that. Even my approach to art-making reflects my spiritual upbringing. The notion of music as a source to connect with something higher drives how I start my brainstorming process. In a world that has taught folks like myself to dim the overtly proud, queer, Black, expressive light within themselves, the notion of letting that little light of mine shine is at the core of all of my work. And most crucial of all, the notion of having faith the size of a mustard seed is what allows me to even continue creating in this moment and time of diversity dissension and financial uncertainty. Spirituality is a practice in which our souls can find peace. Art is no different. Art is spirituality.

Are there specific spiritual or ancestral symbols that appear in your work?

I definitely have work that has imagery directly tied to spiritual practices, like images from my “When I Think About Power” series that depict males wearing chains with pendants displaying an iced-out crucifix, or even covered in water, symbolizing baptism. I think one of the most special to me are the images of the men wearing the church hats that Black women usually wear to Sunday service, as it’s such a gendered symbol of spirituality. Other series showcase church pews, and specific biblical moments interpreted in a new, playful light.

How do you see art as a form of spiritual connection or ritual?

I genuinely think art is spirituality; at least, good art is. There is no link that has to be found, as they are one. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron presents this notion that as an artist we are a “channel for God’s creativity,” and I genuinely believe that to be true. My artistic practice is beyond me. I can truly feel when I am creating because I feel called to do so versus when I am creating for the sake of productivity. There are benefits and value in both, but the results are not the same. When you are called to create, you take to it naturally and it pours out of you generously. It’s a natural flow. Much like when you hear a song that forces you to tap your foot or sing along. It just feels right. Of course, through productivity we make the decision to nurture our artistic skills, but skill isn’t enough to truly say something. If you are saying something with your work, that’s the spirit.

In what ways does your work challenge or expand ideas of faith and belief?

I have an ongoing series that is currently titled “Playing in the Pews,” which directly challenges our (meaning, Black Christian folks) handling of religion and spiritual practices. Growing up in Southern America, I was always taught notions that one can not “play” with God or that I must be a “god-fearing” man. I have always questioned that language. Why must I fear this almighty source of love and peace. Why must my faith in someone/something that works in the most mysterious of ways be bound by practicality and seriousness, as if a playful spirit is somehow lesser?

My work disrupts these rigid ideas, revealing that the faithful are many and that faith itself has no singular look, feel or form. I exist in my unseriousness, my playfulness, my queerness – yet I remain deeply connected to a higher power. Through aesthetics not traditionally aligned with divinity, my art affirms that reverence and irreverence, tradition and subversion, can coexist. Faith is expansive enough to hold it all.

How do you hope your art impacts viewers on a spiritual or emotional level?

Have you ever heard a church singer perform a song that just touches your soul? Or heard a reverend say a line that makes you go “mmm”? You may not always know why but it strikes something in you that’s reactive. It's visceral. You got something you needed that you may not have even known you needed. I hope my work can have that effect on someone. I hope my work moves folks beyond merely something that is cool to look at but is important to remember. I pray I can create work that feeds someone’s soul.

How do music and movement inform the rhythm and flow of your work?

Music is integrated into my life from the dance studio to the atelier. I do listen to a very large and diverse palette of songs since childhood in Guadeloupe, from Cesaria Evora, Kassav, Dancehall, Bouyon to hip-hop, house music and ambient/experimental sound.

I do try to allow the same diversity within my practice by navigating freely between painting, performance, wood sculpture and film.

Movement and movement philosophy is at the core of my work, you can find it as a fragmented form in my paintings or quoted in carved wood. I try to achieve and apply the same freedom I find in dancing while painting.

Are there specific genres or traditions of Black music that influence your art?

Gwo Ka, which is the traditional music from my homeland Guadeloupe; Kompa from Haiti; and of course, hip-hop, house, reggae and dance hall – I consider that as traditional Afro-diasporic music.

Have you ever collaborated with musicians in your creative process?

I have collaborated only with one musician for my performance for 10 years now. His name is Delawhere, and he is based in Paris. He is literally a sound genius in my humble opinion.

What role do you think music and dance play in shaping cultural identity and resistance?

Music and dance cannot be dissociated from the human experience, otherwise life would be very boring.

Movement and sound are human’s first language – not the verb or the tongue. This an unintelligible software which we all have the ability to comprehend, sense, approach or appreciate without previous knowledge or specific cultural heritage

Historically we can easily attach resistance movement to chant and motions which later become a symbolic power able to cross ages.

Recently I saw on social kids from Gaza and Goma in Congo doing breakdance; as if the dance music of hip-hop was their only tools of resilience facing the horror of their daily life

How do your artistic techniques reflect the craftsmanship traditions of your ancestors?

Weaving is one of the many hearts of Black American and Black Diasporic culture, expression and struggle. The warp and weft materials of my fabrics hold in tension patterns of ancestral desires, expressions, rebellions and futures. My family has nurtured the importance of blankets (to keep you warm), church hats (to arrive in style when worshipping), quilts (to tell a story about each fabric pieced together), pillowcases (to rest your head at night) and clothes (to match what's on the inside). Our bodies have always been in proximity to cloth and how it’s been made and tended to. I continue to search and uncover the objects, techniques and ways of knowing that my family has carried through many migrations.

What materials or methods do you incorporate that hold cultural significance?

As a Black-American woman, I try to reclaim that space at the industrial Jacquard loom to activate Black personhood, agency, passion, mourning and resistance. How do I engage with a tool that funded slavery and clothed my ancestors? Working with materials like cotton, wool, beads, charcoal, pastels – materials my family has touched helps me to process and hold these histories.

Sometimes I’ll weave and then draw, collage or embellish on the cloth. The cloth itself becomes this garden of personhood and vibes to live on. Layering with different mediums allows me to reflect upon and confront depths of feelings, expectations and memories.

The repetition of pattern, structure and hands moving to create meaning inherent in 2D and textile mediums (for example, Kente cloth, Black Southern American quilts and Black Panther Party posters) supports the call to spirit and connection with loved ones alive and transitioned.

In what ways does craftsmanship allow you to tell stories that words cannot?

Ways of sharing and passing knowledge exist beyond words written down. They exist in a paint stroke, in a stitch, in a shuffle, in a pound cake, in a beat, in a seed, in a braid. These forms are carriers of how my family came to be, know, practice and repeat – all involving many hands that touched and worked to preserve a tradition passed on to them as a way of connecting and reaching. As Christina Sharpe shows, practicing industrial craft and hand-based craft sets aside time for me to notice repetitive feelings and respond with new modes of making-sensible. Because my family has lived through pain, trauma and labor, I feel like I can continue to do the same. I feel lucky and privileged that my work is a labor that I have the choice and freedom to do.

How do you balance preserving traditional techniques with pushing creative boundaries?

Sometimes a boundary is an opportunity to slow down, call into question and push. Within my own practice, I think about what it means to work with a tool and technology that supported the enslavement and oppression of my ancestors. What does it mean to reject or be complicit in the industrial Jacquard loom’s historic and present colonial and industrial function? How do we break the algorithms of oppression, as Safiya Umoja Noble writes, that are the Jacquard loom? How do we compose acts of resistance as we continue to witness systemic oppression, discrimination and the violence of anti-Blackness, racism and genocide?

Working with and around the limitations of the Jacquard loom gives me the opportunity to insert Black weaving traditions and craft that I know my ancestors worked so hard to preserve. Part of my work is moving with and beyond the Jacquard loom’s violent, industrial function to advocate for and cultivate Black being and making.

What role do you think Black craftsmanship plays in shaping contemporary art and design?

Black craftsmanship has always influenced and shaped what is called contemporary art and design with or without the permission of the makers. Black craftspeople, makers, practitioners, leaders have nurtured creativity for its power to cultivate community, uprising, rejoice, care and building futures. I’m thinking about Black artistry such as jazz, gold chains, clay pots, blacksmithing, soul food, basket making, hip-hop, rag dolls, nail design, wood carving, etc., and how they have been appropriated and accepted as trends to benefit a capitalistic society with disregard to its original function in the Black community.

Our making and craft exists to host culture, spirituality, memory, community, recovery and/or criticality of harmful systems and daily injustices. I keep thinking about these constant lessons in my childhood and many Black upbringings about Black people taking care of Black people and remembering those named and unnamed that came before you. What our ancestors experienced and how our ancestors moved and created will continue to act as lessons and guidance for us and future creators to fight for a liberated, loving world. We will continue to be culture nurturers and bearers.