How do you characterize the media you work in?

I am a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. My work explores how space is perceived, imagined and negotiated particularly by Black and Brown bodies.

How did you arrive at Eyebeam?

I stopped painting and drawing for maybe five or six, maybe seven years. I didn’t find anything interesting to paint about. I couldn’t figure out a conceptual rigor that would make me more intelligent. Painting at that moment could not make me a smarter, more intelligent, more empathetic human being. And I think that’s what painting is for, for me anyway. I abandoned painting, and I went to Eyebeam.

What was your focus during your time at Eyebeam?

When I came in, Eyebeam was trying to figure out, What does it mean to give artists more time over an arc? What I remember is being able to wildly experiment and have the support within technology to do sort of these experimentations with a bit of grace. It was a real sort of moment of being able to invent, make, and be cared for. We talk about care now, but that was a moment where I really felt cared for, and my ideas felt cared for, and sometimes a really good institution can see something in you, you know, you don’t necessarily see in yourself. They can see the energy and the potential. I was able to really make that time work for me, and now, years later, I remember that condition

Did dialogue or collaboration with other Eyebeam artists factor into your work?

Because I was entering a sort of form that I never worked with before, I really needed to problem solve, and problem solving in a safe space can really cause you to catapult; and at Eyebeam the structure allowed me to sort of catapult. I was there with Nancy Nowacek (2014), and Nancy was trying to build a bridge across a body of water in New York, and what I remember about Nancy is her commitment to ethics and engineering, and my proximity to Nancy, and her generosity, and her research, and her kindness, taught me something about witnessing a woman who had the strength and the power to make an army to get something done. She made me feel like ambition was a human right, and that a woman who was tactically interested in infrastructure, and infrastructure as power, and was right, like that was the right road, like that was the right condition.

At Eyebeam, you experimented with not only tech, but new practices and disciplines. How did that impact your work, and as you say, problem solving?

I was trying to figure out solar energy, solar power, solar distribution, and economies around extraction. I remember the day when I really discovered that the problem with renewable energy was storage and distribution. It wasn’t harvesting, and it wasn’t collecting, it was storage and distribution. I was also able to sort of teach myself architectural drawings where I could communicate how to then design something with an renewable array. So renewable energy, the engineering of it, the designing of it was so out there on its own as something I was working on, but the architectural piece allowed me to situate it in place. It allowed me to think about geography, and it allowed me to think about architecture. So during that moment of problem solving in relationship to climate change–climate change specifically for people of color around the planet–and then thinking about sort of how, or why sort of hypercapitalism is tied into extraction. And in that moment, I was able to see how architecture was a host of all of this in different ways, and when I figured that out, this sort of architecture as a host for extraction, then I went directly to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. So when I landed into architecture, and extraction within and on oceans as a super highway in ships, in hulls of ships as a different kind of architecture, then the trade, then the harvesting and exploitation and dispossession of people of color, and then I worked my way to liberation. So Modernism, climate change, Transatlantic Slave Trade, globalization, architecture, and infrastructure. And so it put me in a moment of today and I remember in that space, being able to bring in mapping in a way that I didn’t, based on those liberations. Out of all this information from that research, then I could go back to drawing. And I actually know how to draw, and I actually know how to make paintings. It’s the other things I didn’t really know how to work through. So 2016 was a major shift back to painting and drawing.

Is this what culminated in your Eyebeam organized exhibition, Unkeeping?

I started making paintings and drawings about the research I had done. So then the drawings came, and then somehow I got boards and I was working on anything I could find because I didn’t have any canvases. I didn’t have anything, really. I hadn’t done it in so long. So that room just kept growing and I ordered some canvases, so I made a painting. Ordered more paper, I made more drawings. So just thinking about all of the information I’d gathered through the research was like bubbling in that moment. So I was there quite often trying to put that information into drawing and painting again. So Unkeeping came directly. The title even, we talked about this idea of what does it mean to undo these sort of architectures of inhumanity? What does it mean to undo thinking about Elmina, thinking about slave ships? What does it mean to undo these things architecturally? So I really just started making paintings, taking these structures apart, and then I circled into landscape architecture and was making paintings about lynching trees, and then I circled back into liberation.