Your mural at the Exploratorium is more like peering into the living room of any family in America. Was this a conscious decision to change the tone of your art and return to recentering Black bodies?
Yeah, I'm focusing more on us, but in a different light. Now I'm looking to create work that plants a seed in the minds of the African American community about how we can regain some control in this situation. Something that doesn't take an act of Congress or anything outside of our own control. I want to create a movement that starts right at home where you don't need anyone else. You don't need any equipment. You don't need a book. You just need to really slow down and think and reflect first.
For African Americans, we don't know our cultural traditions. We don't know what our religions were. What our names were even. I used to not really give it much thought. That's an example of how powerful colonization is. I consider myself to be pretty open minded, enlightened and educated, but what were my family's traditions? So much of that is lost. And then on top of that, when we were brought here, we weren't even allowed to maintain the basic traditions of the people who were our oppressors. We couldn’t marry, couldn't live together, own property, be educated. It's a real stumbling block to overcome centuries of that.
So, my work now is giving images of us experiencing what I like to call “Black Joy.". I don't mean necessarily happy, but more images where we're relaxed, where we're slowing down, where we're living free from the sort of mental assault that happens a lot if you're a person of color in this country. It’s difficult to imagine ourselves in these situations because we don't see them. They're not in contemporary media in a way that's real. I'm not talking about sitcom stuff. I'm talking about how we really are. We're just happy and we're chilling, we're listening to music, we're living life, and that can look very different within our community because we're not monolithic. We know what the inside of the dominant culture’s homes look like because that's what we're fed, but they don't know what our homes look like. I feel like it is about reframing and refocusing on what humanity is.