How did centering White people change the narrative?
Martin Luther King Jr. talked about creative tension in the early days of the civil rights movement; it was necessary to create change. You have to reach people emotionally. So, I switched the imagery from really stark and visceral, to more nuanced and more subversive where I'm reimagining Americana. I'm injecting these contemporary issues of racial violence and giving the viewer a front row seat in the image. Black people say, “Oh yeah, you know, that's how we see it.” For White people it’s like, “Oh, is that how I look in this situation?” Then the seed hopefully gets planted. They have to do some work on how they feel about what's going on because this isn't going away.
It isn’t Black people who created these conditions, so I think the onus has to go back onto the White culture that did create them and is facilitating this stuff now. The work that needs to be done is not just for the sake of African Americans, but for White people’s own humanity as well. You can't be a fully expressed human when you're living in a world or in a country where you know these types of things are happening to Black and Brown people.