Bio
Biography
photo by : AJ
I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and have been working as a full time artist in the Dallas/Fort Worth area since 2013. A year after I graduated high school in 2010, I started a tattoo apprenticeship at Last Angels Tattoo in Dallas, under Gerald Garcia and graduated to Artist two years later. I continue to tattoo full time by appointment only. I have created art since early childhood but it wasn't until I began my tattoo journey that I picked up oil painting.
By 2014 I was inundated with images of unarmed black people being shot by the police. During this time, I had a negative encounter with an officer after he reached for his weapon upon being startled when my friend and I entered a restaurant. This experience would have an important impact on how and what I create. In 2015, still heavily influenced by mainstream tattoo culture, I noticed my portrait and realism artwork didn't reflect the faces/features of my community. In conjunction with this realization, my paintings, "World Of Forms" and "World of Being" was a result of the highly publicized killings of Freddie Grey, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Sandra Bland. I made the decision to primarily paint people of color, to not only cope with the traumatic images being shown on the internet and tv, but also to feel like I was contributing to changing the way black men and women are seen. An important element of this decision was to utilize real people as opposed to making faces from my imagination, thus the foundation of collaboration in my process was laid.
I began to seriously pursue a career in studio art in 2017. My shared studio space was located at the Basement Gallery, before we moved to Elevate Studios, in Oak Cliff, Tx.
Continuing to collaborate with models to make art, I expanded my outreach to authors by studying non fiction books dealing mostly with history. After I read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” I made a photo series depicting chapters in the book which then lead me to read “On The Varieties of Mankind”, a book about the accounts of a German anthropologist, Johann F. Blumenbach, whom contributed to the theory of race. I painted a portrait of Blumenbach which depicts him evaluating skulls and categorizing people across the globe in a hierarchy. In this painting I wanted my model in contemporary fashion to help make this character more relatable, as we are still affected by his work.
After realizing that fashion plays an important role in portrait storytelling, I decided to expand my outreach yet again to fashion designers. The Tignon series, featuring cloths worn as a turban headdress by Creole women from Louisiana, produced in collaboration with Chesley Antionette in 2018 help me realize that research; teamwork, and depicting people of color in a constructive manner are elements I want to consistently implement in projects going forward. I like to paint as large as possible with oils and acrylics on canvas, so I started exploring large scale mural opportunities. In late 2019 I was commissioned by the Deep Ellum Foundation and then by the Thanks-Giving Foundation to install my first two public murals. With collaborations being limited due to Covid restrictions at the top of 2020, I turned to my little sister to help me create a larger than life mural, revisiting the aesthetics of World of Forms/Being, which led to an in-depth NPR/KERA interview where I explain how the study of skin and why representation of dark skin is paramount in my work. Immediately following the mural of my sister I was asked to donate public artwork to the City of Fort Worth. Per my usual approach, I decided to represent a cast of real people whom the majority has dark skin. As a result of my decision, after months of work, a city official attempted to remove me from the project with the intent to erase the images of my community and replace them with fictitious people with lighter skin. After a video of me asking for help went viral, I not only regained creative control of the mural but found myself at the forefront of a coalition of artist and arts supporters rallying together in a stance of unity for equity and fair representation with the ever growing demand of public art work.
Presently I am pursing more mural opportunities, creating work for my first solo show and working with a local arts organizing to continue the support and unionizing of artists working in the DFW area.
