Zoller Gallery Hosts "Get Bodied"
My older sister and myself were raised by our freckle faced, ginger mother in Minneapolis, MN. My family spent most of my childhood in low income housing in and around the Twin Cities. My mother was the first in the family to complete her graduate degree and instilled the importance of education in both of her children. Witnessing my only parent work against the academic system and succeed encouraged both my sister and myself to use education as a genuine and liberating form of power that will ultimately break the cycle of generational poverty and addiction that has crippled our family history. I would say I have had a fairly stereo typical "black experience" in America. This is something I have become more aware of and have been asked to justify recently for the institution that is Cranbrook Academy of Art. For sometime my work has been considered "formally ethnic" and defining this measured idea of "brownness" in the academic setting is becoming more of a necessity for my personal growth as an artist and an intellectual searching for a culturally enlightened understanding of society, craft, and fine art.