“I understand blackness from the inside out. What my goal is, is to allow the world to see the humanity that I know personally to be the truth.” – Kehinde Wiley

Racial supremacy has been buried in American history and is still prevalent to this day. 1619 Jamestown Colony is the origin of America’s patriarchy of white supremacy, discrimination, and racism. Fear and generational trauma have been pervasive in Black culture since 1619.  For centuries, Black people have been degraded from slavery, racist imagery, and stereotypes to continued police brutality.

Representation does matter. The representation of Black people has been unsettling, humiliating, and completely inaccurate. Imagery is something that the human experience relies on. It helps a person associate the imagery with themselves and their experiences.  Humiliating imagery is used to further dehumanize races that are socially oppressed. In particular, Blacks are seen as aggressors, products of poverty, and are deemed lesser than. Blacks are not seen as historical and modern authorial and powerful figures.  Caricatures like black face, golliwangs, and other offensive stereotypical imagery have influenced society’s dehumanizing view of the Black people.

I want to break these stereotypical boundaries that restrict the growth and self-love of Black people. My objective is to rewrite the stories of Black people through my work. My work explores the complexity and duality of being a person of color while reflecting on humanity within Blackness. Through visual vocabulary, a smile is incorporated in the majority of my paintings. A smile is used to manifest a person in their truest and purest form. The juxtaposition of figure and background, speaks to the fluidity of being Black through the medium of poured paint. The poured paint depicts the different cultures that are often overlooked, by simply labeling all Black people as African Americans. Many of my portraits are based on photographs taken of my friends, people I admire, and of other artists. This connection that I have with my models is important to capturing the essence of a person. This is how I view the world and Black people. I take a softer approach to how I see Black people while still reflecting on my own experiences.

I do not see us as aggressive, lazy, thugs, ugly, that society has labeled us to be, but as hue-man beings with feelings, ideas, goals, and families.