CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibitions

Grade: 12

Materials: Press on nails, gems, powder pigment, and gel polish
Dimensions: 2 x 2.5 inches
Description: These are part of my efforts to provide cheap, traditionally “ghetto” nail art. They’re long, flashy, bright, and blinged out, which are ways that black women wore their nails in the 90s-2000s, and received scrutiny for. Making and selling flashy nails like this is apart of my reclamation of MY blackness, and dismantling what respectability politics has done to bastardize Black American culture.

Artist Statement: I create what I see in my mind before I sleep, and when I meditate. This consists of glimpses of my life in the future, or in a different dimension, where colors are saturated, and everything is pretty. I make paintings about blackness in its most divine form, and mix fantasy with it, inspired partially by the Yoruba mythos. Sometimes, I make the most nonsensical things I can think of just to clear my mind, or jewelry or accessories to feel like I’m special.

I mostly use acrylic for my most technical pieces, and watercolor is for my loose, scenic pieces that show how incohesive my imagination is sometimes. I print my favorite works because I need to see them over, and over, because the repetition reminds me of the images I see often when I visualize. I don’t have a real method of making art. Sometimes I feel it before I create it, and sometimes I just put pencil on paper, and hope it all comes together. When none of it works, I cross my legs, and meditate to get into my zone. My Yoruba culture and my aspirations are what I look to for guidance.

I draw black girls because I want black girls to look at my works and remember that they can be divine, nymph-like creatures, even though we aren’t often represented that way in the media, or in real life. My main objective is to show them that magic. We deserve to feel like art, through representation or how we adorn ourselves. So I make art for people who need to feel like art.

I can’t separate myself from my black identity, because I hope to bring something new to my community. I want to be able to reach people like me, and the people who don’t understand me at all, inside and outside the community. When I’ve struggled with feeling like the world was against me, especially when I find that it really might be, due to who I am. I retreat into my head, and make something from that feeling. I want people to look and see glamour in what I think, what I can do, and feel a little bit of the lightness that I feel when I’ve completed a piece that I’m in love with.