An Artist on Attention, Memory, and Meaning

With the work that I do, and the work that inspires me, the medium is often determined by proximity and positionality. As a Black boy growing up in the South, visual art was one of my earliest forms of expression. I spent a lot of time drawing, listening to music, and writing. Those things shaped how I interpreted the world around me and how I responded to it. If I read something, I might illustrate it. If I had an experience with someone, it might become a song or a poem. Growing up in the church also influenced me because so much of the creative work I love is rooted in call and response. At the same time, people encounter the work differently depending on how they know me. Some know me as a designer, others as a music producer, photographer, artist, or storyteller. Meaning moves through all those platforms, but it is always shaped by where we stand in relation to it.

I love home because of the way I grew up. My grandmother used to drop me off in Wylam, Alabama, and I would spend time sitting with elders, listening to conversations that might have seemed mundane but carried so much texture and meaning. A lot of what I value in music and art comes from those experiences. I've become deeply interested in folk art and vernacular art, people like Thornton Dial, Joe Minter, and Roy Robinson, and the way they use found objects and everyday materials to create narratives. Growing up in the South made me endeared to doing more with less. It taught me how to tell big stories about small things. Whether visually or sonically, I think Southern culture teaches you how to slow things down, process the everyday, and communicate those experiences in ways that feel deeply personal.

I think about the quilts from Gee's Bend and artists like Yvonne Wells. Those quilts were part of the communities I grew up in, and while people may study them academically today, what I saw was utility, function, and love. I think about gospel music in the same way. Some of the most talented musicians I've ever known played in local churches. They were gifted people long before anyone gave them credentials. The same is true for people who braid hair, tell stories, or know how to read a room and diffuse tension. There are so many things within our communities that become incredibly complex when people try to explain them academically, but for us they were simply part of living. They were gifts.

We've commodified our attention spans, and by doing so we've created a race to the bottom. Companies and creators are constantly looking for new ways to capture attention, and very few people want to risk status, visibility, or income on work that asks audiences to slow down and think. Everything has to be immediate. Everything has to be understood instantly. But meaningful work often requires people to sit with complexity. That's why artists like Kendrick Lamar and André 3000 resonate so deeply. They take complex ideas and allow us to sit with them long enough to reveal something about ourselves and the society we're living in.

Creating work that lingers means speaking to the heart of our society and our most basic human experiences. Love, triumph, revenge, poverty, aspiration, and survival are things people return to across generations. We've been creating in that vein for centuries through stories, songs, and cultural traditions that help people understand the world around them. One of my friends once described it as giving language to people who may struggle to find that language for themselves. Work that lingers becomes something people carry with them. It travels with them like a good book, a favorite song, a family story, or a piece of clothing passed from one generation to the next.

It's difficult because we're navigating multiple audiences at once. There is the pressure of the dominant culture, the expectations of our own communities, and now the reality of social media where everyone has access to the work and an opinion about it. The more I read, the more I appreciate people like Nikki Giovanni, bell hooks, and James Baldwin because they were honest about their humanity, their disappointment, and their doubt. That's the tradition I want to create within. Honesty costs relationships and opportunities because there are people willing to elevate you if you're willing to ignore what's happening in society or within yourself. But I want people who encounter my work to know they are not alone in their realism. Joy comes from being grounded, not from pretending everything is fine.

Music preserves far more than sound. It preserves language, values, ideas about freedom, beauty, and identity. If you listen closely to music from different generations, you can hear how people understood themselves and the world around them. I see the same thing happening through apparel, photography, and now social media. One of the things that fascinates me most is how ordinary people are becoming archivists. They upload photographs, preserve flyers, share stories, and document lives that institutions may never think to record. Social media has given communities the ability to build archives of their own and participate directly in preserving cultural memory.

I hope future generations see the value of curiosity, even when it's accompanied by uncertainty. When I think about people like Alvin Ailey, Gordon Parks, and Melvin Van Peebles, what inspires me most is that they moved through the world boldly and came back with something of substance. I hope younger artists, especially those coming from places like Alabama, Montgomery, Ensley, and Irondale, see what's possible and continue creating. When I wrote my thesis, I was grateful for the small group of people who took the time to document knowledge that might otherwise have been lost. Whether five people encounter my work or five million, I hope it helps someone create understanding, build community, and love their neighbors. That would be a good thing to leave behind.