Artist Statement
I make work that explores my love for Western Art History conflicting with my identity as a black woman, with a focus on technical aptitude and aesthetics the way the old masters did. The art I love embodies white supremacy, patriarchy at its purest, and willing-ignorance so potent that the West was the absolute center of the universe. The patrons of it would have wanted me enslaved and the artists themselves had such intense religious guilt that they oppressed their homosexual urges while treating women as deplorable objects. Everything about it is broken, but they’re considered the masters. The discourse within me is about how much I simultaneously despise everything about art in the early Modern era, and base my idea of success on it. I love it. I love the interiors of Catholic churches. I consume the work of Michelangelo, Velazquez, and Frans Hals, and the hundreds of other successful men across hundreds of years. But that doesn’t change what they were or what I am, or how my identity inherently conflicts with it.
How am I supposed to reach their level of skill when I can’t spend every waking moment as an artist and only an artist? My age, my gender, my skin, my time, everything conflicts with this desire, but I can’t shake it.
