Coming Soon
The Blueprint
When you look at the trajectory of Black life in America, you aren't looking at a machine that broke down. You’re looking at a machine that’s doing exactly what it was built to do. Systemic oppression wasn't an accident, and it wasn't a series of unfortunate mistakes—it was planned, drafted, and engineered step by step. That’s what I’m laying bare in my painting, The Blueprint. I wanted to take the institutional destruction of Black lives and present it for what it truly is: a structural master plan.
Think about how a blueprint works. Before a single brick gets laid or a foundation gets poured, an architect sits down and decides where the walls go, where the doors lock, and who is allowed inside. For Black people, the design of this country was specifically drawn to enclose us, restrict us, and extract from us.
In the lower right-hand corner of my painting, where you’d normally find the title block on an architectural drawing, I put the address and website of the White House. I did that because the government itself authorized these designs. The client listed is White Supremacy—the ultimate beneficiary that funded and demanded this work. I named Willie Lynch as the architect to point to the psychological strategies used to fracture our unity, while Uncle Sam is the one holding the pen as the draftsman. And the date? It reads "In Perpetuity," because unless we tear the whole framework down, this machine just keeps running on autopilot.
Across the blueprint itself, written in the precise handwriting of the draftsman, I’ve listed the "revisions"—the ways the system updated its code over time to keep us subjugated:
- The Punishment Clause: The 13th Amendment officially ended slavery, but it left a legal back door wide open: "except as a punishment for crime." That single clause incentivized the instant criminalization of Black life, turning plantations into convict leasing systems and laying the groundwork for mass incarceration today.
- The Black Codes: Right after emancipation, these laws were drafted to strip us of economic independence. They restricted where we could live, where we could work, and whether we could own property, effectively trapping us right back in the social order of slavery.
- Federal Redlining: In the 20th century, the government drew literal red lines around Black neighborhoods on official maps, denying us mortgages and federal investment. It was a targeted, state-sponsored destruction of our ability to build generational wealth, and we’re still feeling those financial consequences today.
I painted The Blueprint to force a direct confrontation with our reality. You can't fix or reform a structure if you refuse to acknowledge how it was built in the first place. By laying out the actual schematics of Black subjugation, I want you to look past the surface of today’s racial inequities and see the structural drawings that made them possible.
WHY AMERICAN WOMAN: A LYNCHING SERIES
WHY AMERICAN WOMAN: A LYNCHING SERIES
Her body is the canvas, mocha hues, set against her country’s red, white, and blue backdrop, telling our story for generations.
I’ve always been a fan of pin-up art and erotica and have been greatly moved and inspired by the works of artists like Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren, and Hajime Sorayama. However, for as long as pin-up has existed as an American art form, few images have focused on Black women, and none of the few illustrations merged historical elements into their compositions. Painting nude or semi-nude women does not interest me in and of itself. Painting “pin-up” art of Black women had to be about more than “Look, white artists do it. I can do it, too.” The traditional phrase “pin-up” and its close relationship to the word “lynching” was too enticing to be ignored. Hence, the series appellation. The word “lynching” redacts the word pin-up in my mind and so is reflected in the series logo. Between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched. Lynching typically involved extreme brutalities such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, immolation, and desecration.
Why a lynching series? What could I possibly be attempting to do? Idealistically, there are several things I hope my series will address. Using the Black female body as a totem for issues that have faced the larger African-American community; hopefully, forcing candid conversations about racial inequities is my intent. The Black woman, having internalized a foreign value system and attempting to imitate her white counterpart, becomes a distortion of herself. Highlighting an appreciation of Black beauty that might manifest in the abandonment of fake fingernails, false eyelashes, and the wearing, weaving, and gluing of hair from other ethnicities onto their heads would be ideal.
Also, I wish to reconsider the cultural origins of presenting the Black woman as “strong and independent,” brimming with a “combative attitude,” and how that stereotype has sometimes benefited and simultaneously harmed her image. The artistic merging of social/political and historical elements and the African-American female form elevates the works beyond pastiche.
Lastly, white men who appreciate the erotic nature of these paintings and are attracted to African-American women should consider these visual offerings an opportunity to experience a reckoning with the social-historical components that combine to make up what they find alluring.
This is the ideological approach to my “pin-up” art and, for me, separates my work from pornography. Truth is the goal; the Black female form is the vehicle by which larger, more complex, honest conversations about race may be sparked.
