Artist Statement
The Unspectacular Negro: Searching for The Oasis Promised is a multimedia reexamination of my upbringing and the expectations of Black bodies in society. I, like my community, am searching for the oasis promised, but find more rejection and less attention. The body of work focuses on the paradox of being invisible while simultaneously being visible. More often than not, Blackness is portrayed in the media as a monolithic experience; however, this series strays from creating a public performance that fits a mold. Each collaborator in this work was chosen to represent different, but not all perspectives of the Black experience. How living as a Black individual may also change the very way one identifies themselves.There is a performance that is often ingrained into Black society, the role of the “spectacular negro”: conditioning to perform away one’s Blackness. A part of this conditioning are the many rules and traditions that are taught within the Black experience for protection, which leads to silencing parts of ourselves in public and private spaces. With multiple depictions of Blackness, how does one define it and understand what true Black aesthetic is?
