Artist Statement

My work serves as a visual expression for decolonization, using mixed-media paintings and illustrations to expose the complexities of ethnicity, identity, and systemic injustice. Rooted in my Afro-Indigenous heritage, my art fuses allegorical figures, symbolic iconography, and a vivid color palette to confront dominant colonial narratives directly, sparking critical dialogue about identity, resistance, and survival, and examining cultural diffusion's (spreading of cultural ideas, items, technologies, religions, traditions, language between individuals, whether within a single culture or from one culture to another) impact on Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) and Native religions, American communities. My work fiercely preserves my family's ancestral stories and safeguards their Indigenous cultural teachings from erasure, while sparking dialogue on identity and representation.

My work counters the invisibility imposed by colonial structures and mainstream art institutions, centering and elevating Afro-Indigenous and Native American experiences. Informed by historical research, Indigenous scholarship, and personal testimony, my interdisciplinary practice engages geography, folklore, and mythology as cultural defense and reclamation methods. Positioned within the contemporary Afro-Indigenous and decolonial art movements, my work disrupts and dismantles exclusionary narratives, reclaiming sovereign space for Afro-Indigenous identities. I challenge viewers to confront whose histories are silenced or told, whose identities are being acknowledged, whose cultures are being erased, and how art must serve as a witness and a weapon for cultural survival, justice, and radical transformative change.