Art is an invitation to be curious about who I am, while my relationships with people around me give me the courage to transform who I am.

I have been making art for a long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of drawing comic books of imagined adventures with my cousins in the basements of our houses, feverishly drawing and stapling paper and running upstairs to show my mother or my aunts. I was raised by my single mother in Detroit in the 90’s but we weren't alone. My mother is one of eleven siblings, and my cousins and I are the children of the eleven, who grew up in the safety of the herd.

For 10 years, I have been making art with young people and educators. I have worked with high schoolers to make mosaic infographics. I have worked with third and fourth graders to compose and choreograph music videos.  At the intersection of art and education there are constant invitations to be curious and so many relationships through which to foster transformation.

In these projects, Untitled and Of Eleven, I am trying to play at similar intersections, in many ways my first intersections: art and family. All of the photographs in these works are of people that I intimately know, my mother, my father, my aunts, uncles and grandparents, but nearly all of them were made before I existed. Seeing these photographs is like reading a prequel to a story you love. These photos are, in a way, prequels to my life. In these works, I am reconciling my own story, with the stories contained in the photographs.

I began making this work in 2009, shorty before I moved back to Detroit. I had just completed my BFA and my love for analog photography moved me to begin archiving and scanning family photos. The first images were playfully constructed, juxtaposing images of my family with my own contemporary work. Some of these first images have gone on to become Untitled.

Of Eleven started with grief. The family that raised me had changed; my grandparents and one of my mother’s siblings all passed away within two years of each other. My cousins that I grew up with now live spread across the country. In 2016 my mother’s father, my last grandparent, died. As a part of putting his affairs in order we cleaned out his home and I began to collect the photographs that my grandmother had kept. My intention was to archive them and in the process, I began to revisit the work I had started in 2009. I decided to work with the images to create a new body of work that would allow me to celebrate and grieve the transformations of my mother’s family, the family that had raised me. These new images that I am making are a homage to the life these eleven siblings gave me and to my grandparents who gave the eleven their lives.