Visual Artist

"Legacy Restored"

About the Artist

"My journey began with one question: Where is my reflection in the halls of history? This search birthed Portraits for the Culture, an outward mission to archive the rituals and families of Black life. Through this work, I found that the deepest wound is the silent grief of broken legacies. Erasure finds its influence in our inability to share these fractured stories; when our broken legacies remain unspoken, the erasure becomes absolute. Legacy, Restored is my response—a journey of healing. It turns the lens inward to reckon with the personal cost of historical silence, then outward to restore the shared narratives that are the only true counter to erasure."

This project is my act of restoration—for myself, for my community, and the impact of our legacies on future generations.

Check out my full bio and CV here: Visual Artist - Bio
Check out Portraits for the Culture, the project that inspired this work: Visual Artist - Portraits for the Culture

Artistic Pursuit & Social Research.

Legacy serves as a foundational mechanism through which individuals and communities transmit identity, values, memory, and cultural knowledge across generations. In many communities, particularly within African American families, this transmission has historically occurred through oral traditions mediated by elders. While oral knowledge sharing offers resilience and adaptability, it remains vulnerable to disruption when trauma, grief, or untimely loss interrupts intergenerational continuity.

This research emerged from my lived experience as the artist‑researcher, with the inability to access my familial history following the early loss of my father, due to suicide, revealed the personal consequences of legacy disruption. The absence of recorded materials and shared narratives created an emotional and cognitive gap that impeded my self‑understanding and long‑term personal development. This realization prompted a broader investigation into how legacy failure operates systemically and how art may provide corrective structures.

Introduction — Arrival

The work arrives as a finished body only in appearance. In reality, it represents an extended journey of instinctive making, reflection, and discovery. What began without a predetermined plan gradually revealed its structure, purpose, and responsibility. The paintings, rituals, and documentation that now exist are the visible outcome of a process shaped by lived experience, exploration, and emotional insight rather than formal intention.

Early Conditions — Absence as a Starting Point

Before the work existed, there was an absence—an unarticulated sense of missing information, lineage, and continuity. This absence was not immediately understood as a research question or creative theme, but rather experienced as a condition that shaped perception, identity, and personal development. The lack of accessible family history and shared narratives created gaps that were felt long before they were consciously named.

Instinctive Making — Painting Before Understanding

The earliest paintings emerged instinctually. There was no formal framework guiding their production—only repetition, endurance, and the need to work through something that could not yet be articulated. The act of painting functioned as a way of thinking and feeling simultaneously, allowing unresolved questions to surface visually rather than verbally.

Exploration and Exposure — Movement Beyond the Studio

As the work developed, travel and exposure to different cultural environments expanded the context in which the paintings were understood. Encounters with traditions emphasizing oral history, ancestry, ceremony, and collective memory revealed alternative systems of continuity—systems that made visible what had been absent elsewhere.

This exposure did not immediately generate solutions, but it reframed the problem by demonstrating that knowledge preservation depends as much on structure and ritual as it does on storytelling itself.

Exchange and Participation — Listening as Practice

The work shifted from solitary exploration to relational engagement. Portraits were created and offered to others, not as documentation, but as gestures of exchange. Conversations that followed these exchanges introduced lived histories, fragments of memory, and patterns of silence that echoed the artist’s own experience.

Listening became as central to the work as making, transforming the process from personal exploration into collective inquiry.

Recognition of Patterns — Absence Repeated

Through sustained engagement with participants, recurring patterns became visible. Knowledge was often transmitted orally and dependent on elders, whose absence, trauma, or silence resulted in lost histories. These repetitions confirmed that the absence initially experienced was not isolated, but systemic.

At this point, the work began to function computationally—identifying conditions, repetitions, and gaps—without abandoning its emotional foundation.

Breakthrough — From Oral Tradition to Ritual Structure

A key realization emerged: oral tradition alone, when detached from ritual and ceremony, struggles to survive in contemporary contexts. Storytelling requires not only speakers and listeners, but environments that encourage recall, vulnerability, and sharing.

This recognition marked the transition from instinctive practice to intentional structure.

Creation of Ritual — The Portrait Reveal

In response, an experimental structure was developed: a ritualized process centered on the creation and ceremonial unveiling of portraits within family and community spaces. These gatherings created emotionally authentic environments that facilitated storytelling, reflection, and collective presence. Familiar cultural rhythms and symbolism made participation feel natural rather than imposed.

The ritual functioned as both an artistic intervention and a methodological breakthrough.

Recording and Preservation — Ensuring Continuity

Within these ritual environments, digital and physical recording became possible and meaningful. Documentation was no longer intrusive, but a natural extension of shared experience. Stories, reflections, and responses could now be preserved, ensuring that legacy extended beyond the immediate moment and participants.

The work expanded from expression to responsibility.

Public Encounter — The Gallery as Collective Space

The solo exhibition marked the transition from private inquiry to public engagement. Installed in the gallery, the work invited viewers into the process rather than presenting conclusions. Audience responses, interactions, and reflections completed the lifecycle of the work, confirming its relevance beyond its origin.

The gallery became the final ritual—where absence, discovery, and healing were collectively acknowledged.

Present Moment — From Instinct to Responsibility

What began as instinctive making has matured into a defined artistic thesis and practice. The work now exists simultaneously as painting, process, ritual, and record. Its current form reflects an understanding that legacy does not persist by chance—it must be intentionally created, shared, and preserved.

The present moment is not an ending, but a continuation, oriented toward future impact.

Restoring a Legacy

It is only through my own healing that I can begin the work of restoration. For me, as an artist, that process starts in the studio. The act of painting, reflecting, and interpreting allows me to navigate the pain and find a path forward where conversation felt impossible. My artistic practice became the bridge back to my father’s memory, allowing me to separate the man from the tragedy and restore the values he embodied. This work was not done in isolation; it was deepened through conversations with friends and family, whose shared stories provided clarity, support, and a collective path toward healing.

This project, Legacy Restored, confronts the essential question that grew from my experience: How do we restore a legacy that has been broken? It is a question I see reflected in the wider world, where the effort to misrepresent or erase collective histories is an unfortunate and ever-present reality. But the core of the work remains rooted in that first, personal wound.

The project investigates this in three parts:

First, it asks you, the viewer, to question what legacy means to you. It challenges us to see legacy as a living force in our own lives, one that requires our active participation.

Second, it seeks to map the void left by a broken legacy. Through a series of allegorical paintings, the project gives a symbolic language to the internal trauma, paranoia, and dissolution that I first felt. It explores the psychological cost of being disconnected from your own history.

Finally, the project moves from the wound to the work of restoration. This series of portraits and accompanying video interviews immortalizes the faces, voices, and truths of impactful individuals willing to share their stories. By adding the physical act of preservation—the painting, the recording—to the renewed power of oral tradition, we fortify these legacies. We are turning personal histories into enduring monuments of resilience and wisdom.

One half of the project shows the wound of absence and endured grief; the other presents the powerful remedy of restoration and healing. Together, they are an assertion that a legacy, even one broken by trauma, can be restored—and that once restored, it can never truly be erased again.

Erasure of Legacy & the need for new methods of capture:

In a climate where the integrity of Black and b\Brown legacies is being actively challenged in our books and museums, we must expand our methods of preservation beyond oral tradition. By embracing recordings, ceremonies, and art, we declare that you do not need to be famous to be monumental. This work is about holding space for our own histories and celebrating legacies that demand to be restored.

The Dialogue: At the heart of Legacy, Restored is a collaborative inquiry into the nature of legacy, built upon a sacred partnership between the artist as Host and a select group of individuals as Co-Hosts.

This project was born from a personal reckoning. While trying to understand the nature of legacy in reference to Black culture and my own family history, I was confronted by a painful silence. In conversations with the individuals, I interviewed and painted in the past, a familiar pattern emerged: a fractured recall of their own family legacies, often for reasons mirroring my own. There was fracture in the collective memory, the stories muted, and the consequences were echoing down through the generations.

This shared experience has led me to these three guiding questions, which form the heart of our dialogue. They are designed to explore our shared journey from understanding legacy to the work of restoring it.

1. Defining Our Inheritance: What is a Legacy to You?

To begin, I want to understand what "legacy" means to you personally. We often think of it as something passed down, but the what and why can be different for everyone. Is it a specific value from your family? An ideal you learned from your community? Or something you are building yourself? Thinking about where legacies come from and what makes them valuable, how would you define the idea of a legacy?

2. The Broken Chain: How Do We End Up Needing to Restore?

Legacies are fragile. Before we can talk about restoring them, we have to understand how they become broken in the first place. Sometimes, it’s an internal break, caused by a personal pain or trauma so great that a family simply stops telling its own stories. Other times, it’s an external attack through the intentional erasure of our histories. From your perspective, how do we end up in a position where a legacy needs to be fought for and restored?

3. The Living Monument: How Will Your Legacy Endure?

We know that oral traditions, while powerful, can fade over time. This final question is about making sure your legacy doesn't. Looking forward, I’d like you to identify the single most important legacy you feel responsible for carrying. What is that core story, value, or truth? And crucially, beyond speaking it aloud, what are the ways you are preserving it—or hope to preserve it—so that it becomes a lasting monument for generations to come?

Legacy, Restored is my answer. At its heart is the portrait reveal, which I’ve reimagined as a modern ceremony—a ritual, a celebration, and a powerful act of restoration all at once.

The ceremony provides a platform for preserving legacy by blending sacred tradition with new forms. It is inspired by the West African Griot, the living archive and historian who reinforces a village’s collective wisdom through oral tradition. It is also shaped by the communal act of quilt-making, a modern tradition of weaving individual stories into a collective whole. We do this through a sacred trust between the artist as Host and a select group of individuals as Co-Hosts.

The Portrait Reveal

Each portrait created for Legacy, Restored will be unveiled at an intimate and celebratory event. More than a simple art opening, the Portrait Reveal is a communal act of remembrance. Hosted for the Guest and their chosen circle of friends, family, and community, this event honors their story and officially welcomes their portrait into the collection. These powerful moments will be filmed, capturing the living, breathing heart of the project and transforming a private legacy into a shared, public testimony.

Solo Show 2026

The culmination of this multi-year effort will be a major solo exhibition in 2026. This curated show will weave together every element of the project to create a comprehensive, immersive experience at Quid Nunc Art Gallery

Tangible outcomes of the Legacy, Restored project include:

A Major Exhibition: A powerful, curated collection of approximately 25-30 original paintings and photographs.
A Definitive Coffee Table Book: A high-quality, published book featuring all artwork, compelling excerpts from the interviews, and essays from the artist and guest contributors.

We are actively seeking partnerships with supporters, collectors, and curators to bring this timely and significant body of work to a global audience.

Past

Portraits for the Culture

BIG!

Virtual Series

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