I am currently working on several bodies of work. My main focus is on the two projects detailed below.

Ode to Home, is an ongoing photographic essay project. Originally, this work was comprised of a series of 42 photographs exploring my hometown. Through utilizing a combination of archival documents, family photographs and original photography, this project draws connections between local landmarks and my family’s history and connection to place. I am currently compiling these original elements into an artist book; expanding and enriching the project’s narrative through the addition of text and other elements.

In the Shadow of Dixie is an ongoing project featuring the documentation of a performance series that began on the 1st anniversary of the Unite the Right Rally. The Confederate monuments in the eight cities across Georgia previously mentioned are protected by state law. My performances consisted of sitting in the monument’s shadow while handwriting a series of custom-made postcards that were sent to every politician with jurisdiction over each space. In its current form, this work manifests as a multimedia installation that has become its own intervention and form of resistance that illuminates, informs, and calls its audiences to action, drawing attention to the role Southern women played in organizing and funding those monuments and my role as a Black, Southern-born and raised queer person organizing against them.

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back where it was.” - Toni Morrison 

I am a mother, a river, a poet-whisperer.

My birth began my family’s first generation after the Civil Rights Act and its fifth generation post-Emancipation. Situating myself in time in this way demonstrates an understanding that past, present, and future cannot be separated from one another. My practice reflects this fluidity of time, illustrating how significant events in American history left their marks on the lives of the ancestors and elders of my family, and also how those events remain present in younger generations. Beliefs, behaviors, values are heirlooms passed from one generation to the next. This inheritance is visible in our landscapes, cultural environments, and in the mythologies we hold onto. 

A river runs from its present in one place to its future in another, gradually and meticulously shaping its surroundings along the way. In its constant flow of water and dynamic change, time collapses. Past, present, and future exist simultaneously. The women in my family are also rivers—recorders and keepers of recipes, stories, photographs, documents, and traditions. Through their guidance, I have found that events of the past simultaneously shape our present and future. I work across media, gathering still and moving images, documents, objects, sound, and oral narratives. These archival elements are transformed through my creative process becoming monuments of duality: past and present, nature and artifice, obsolescence and relevance, strength and oppression, pride and anger, joy and grief, memory and recorded history, evidence and critique. 

Grateful for the strength, perseverance, and vision of my ancestors, I follow their example while also forging a new path by combining this collection of evidence with my own interpretation and response. Morrison once said that her writing draws on emotional and embodied memory.  Inspired by her strategy for combining imagination with the archive, I create a new history and personal geography through accumulations of objects, images, media, and text along with physically occupying space with my body. Looking back is equally important to my practice as looking forward. Accepting this role as past keeper, present shaper, and future builder comes with responsibilities. The stories of the past are a gift. They hold knowledge, wisdom, complexity and mystery. It is my task to hold them, to keep them, to distill their lessons, to foster healing, to apply their wisdom in my own life, and to pass them on, intact and with annotation.

Community-based Learning and Research Course Mini Grant,  The Swearer Center at Brown University, 2022

Public Humanities Scholar Award, Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, 2021

Project Fund Grant, The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, 2021

Pratt>FORWARD, Pratt University, 2020 

MacColl Johnson Fellowship Semi-Finalist, Rhode Island Foundation, 2019

Project Fund Grant, The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, 2019

Emerging Artist Award, St. Botolph Club Foundation, 2018

Artist Fellowship in New Genres, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, 2018

Artist Fellowship, RISD Museum, 2018