When Jeffrey Kent moved into a luxury apartment overlooking Druid Hill Park in the ’80s, it was one of the nicest places he’d ever lived. It reminded him of a scene straight out of a Woody Allen film, with treetop views of Baltimore’s “Central Park.” Except for one thing. There was no art on the walls.

And he had ample time to stare at them. He’d just gotten fired from his day job at a Georgetown haberdashery, where he sold menswear, after being arrested for possession and conspiracy to distribute cocaine. He decided to make his own art and started creating bright, abstract acrylic paintings, often with words embedded in them, to hang in his apartment. Meanwhile, he continued hustling, because, as he put it recently, he still had rent to pay—and now lawyer fees.

“But then people started trying to buy the paintings,” Kent recalls. “People I was selling drugs to—lawyers and doctors and accountants—and the people I was buying drugs from, who had money from selling drugs…they started buying the paintings off my walls. So I had to keep making more.”

It worked out nicely. He fell in love with making art, and he’d also inadvertently given himself a business front. He could tell his family he was selling paintings. Kent never imagined then that art would one day become his life and that he’d influence so many people through his creative work and vision.

In the decades since, Kent has become a mentor for emerging artists, a lodestar for people looking to navigate the art world, and a liaison between working artists and collectors, ultimately being instrumental in putting Baltimore on the map of the art world.

He gave Amy Sherald her first studio space and worked alongside the artist who would become world-renowned for painting her Michelle Obama portrait, which is in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection. Kent and Sherald remain close friends.

Kent also gave Jerrell Gibbs his first studio space, mentored him, and encouraged him to apply to MICA’s M.F.A. program in painting, despite the fact that Gibbs had not earned an undergraduate degree (after all, Kent had done it). Gibbs was later commissioned to paint the Elijah Cummings portrait for the U.S. Capitol and is now represented by the prestigious Chicago-based Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which exhibited his work in a solo show in Paris this summer. Kent joined Gibbs there for the opening reception.

Kent set out to be a successful artist long ago—and he achieved that, with work in collections at the National Academy of Sciences and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, among several other institutions. But how he finds time to work on his craft—and still sleep—is something of a mystery, even to his assistant.

Because ultimately the work he’s become best known for is the sculpting of the Baltimore art world itself—as co-founder and co-director of Connect + Collect, chief curator at the recently reopened Peale museum, an adjunct professor at MICA, and founder of Accomplished Art Apprentices, among other roles. His quiet influence over the work and careers of so many artists—as well as collectors, curators, and gallerists—has grown and innovated our regional art scene.

“We all started under Jeffrey Kent at 120 Studio,” says Baltimore artist, author, and entrepreneur Chris Wilson. “He has this gift for giving advice, and he’s influenced a lot of artists’ careers heavily. He’s the king- and queen-maker.”

On a warm September day, Kent’s tall stature exudes a calm presence over his living room in Station North, where he takes a seat next to his assistant, Cleo Rose, at a glass table against a backdrop of art—a miniature who’s who gallery of the Baltimore art scene and beyond. Directly behind him is a work of his own, a floor-to-ceiling collage made of pages of O, The Oprah Magazine, with a large “O” painted over it in blue and a glossy, layered finish. The piece is part of a series, he explains, that will be included in his autobiography through art, which he’s been working on for years. The “Zero” series pays homage to a particular Winfrey show that told the stories of women who had quit their day jobs to live their dream—an episode that played in the back of Kent’s mind for years before he would essentially do the same thing.

Long before that, as a kid growing up in Baltimore, Kent found inspiration in the TV show Bewitched—in particular, the character Darrin Stephens, who worked at an advertising firm. Kent’s young-but-entrepreneurial-minded brain was intrigued.

“Of course, I had pipe dreams of doing something creative, because no one in my family thought it was a good idea,” Kent says. “I got no support growing up.”

 

“HE’S INFLUENCED A LOT OF ARTISTS’ CAREERS HEAVILY. HE’S THE KING- AND QUEEN-MAKER.”

 

After the wake-up call of his arrest, and the subsequent newfound passion for painting, Kent inquired about a vacant building on the corner of Baltimore and Charles streets that got heavy foot traffic. He had the idea—innovative at the time—to install his art in its storefront windows, as he felt ready for the public (not just drug dealers and his clientele) to see his work after two years of painting. The owners were not only excited by his proposition but asked if he’d be interested in operating a full-scale gallery inside.

“I’m like, I’m an artist. I’m not a gallerist. Like, what is this? They told me, ‘You don’t have to pay any rent, no electric, just get a phone and a sign.’ I’m like, I guess I can’t say no to that. So, that’s how I got my first art gallery, Hand Originals. It was really crazy.”

The new space became the impetus for Kent connecting with the Baltimore art scene and expanding his client base—and also for getting clean, after a brief relapse. He also learned he had a penchant for transforming spaces. After running Hand Originals, he moved into a studio in the Copycat Building and renovated the space so well that when the owner saw it, and realized what he could then get for it, he wanted to double Kent’s monthly rent, Kent recalls with a laugh.

Instead, Kent left and found another place to work, this time an 8,000-square-foot warehouse space in the Abell building on the corner of Baltimore and Eutaw streets. It had sat vacant for more than 25 years, he says, and he worked to transform it into a dream studio. The space was so inspiring that Kent, with that Oprah episode in mind, quit his day job selling cars to focus on art
full-time.

“I told myself I’d rather be dead than do anything else but make art for the rest of my life,” he says.

Fast-forward another 10 years of making art to 2008, and Kent was accepted into MICA’s graduate program in painting. He credits Leslie King-Hammond, then dean of the program, for giving him a deeper understanding of art and helping him to develop his skill for critique.

“She taught me so much about myself and my art,” Kent says. “MICA changed my life.”

At the same time, before, during, and after his schooling, Kent was running SubBasement Artist Studios, a huge live/work space on Howard Street that closed in 2014 after a decade in operation.

Cara Ober, founding editor and publisher at BmoreArt, discovered SubBasement as a grad student at MICA and was immediately impressed with what Kent was doing.

“It was really the only artist-run space that was effectively selling art. He was the first person selling Amy Sherald, who had a studio there. I remember at the time thinking, ‘Good God, these prices.’ Amy Sherald’s paintings were selling for $5,000. I was like, ‘These are gorgeous, but I don’t have $5,000,’” Ober says.

“So many artists were undervaluing and underpricing their work, and Jeffrey was like, ‘Nope. This is the price.’ And, as a result, the people who could buy, did…Jeffrey was the one person who was actively cultivating relationships with real estate developers and different kinds of collectors or, as he described it, ‘people in a position to support artists.’ People who could buy art for the price that it deserves to get. Is my husband mad at me that we didn’t buy any Amy Sherald back then? Yes. He’s like, ‘Why don’t you just buy everything Jeffrey buys?’ He’s right. Jeffrey just seems to have a sense of whose work is gonna blow up.”

In 2019, Kent and Ober would go on to found Connect + Collect, a program under BmoreArt that connects collectors to emerging artists in Baltimore through studio visits and talks, usually with Kent serving as host.

“Most collectors buy in New York or Basel or Miami,” Ober points out, “but a lot of these people are also buying a significant amount in Baltimore, and I think that is in large part because of Jeffrey.”

By the 2010s, Kent had gained a solid reputation for himself as an artist and curator and organically became the go-to mentor for young artists, especially Black men in Baltimore.

Devin Allen, for instance, after receiving national attention for his black-and-white photo of the Freddie Gray riots that appeared on the cover of Time magazine (he would land another Time cover in 2020), found himself wanting to evolve his art and break free from the limits of photography. He wanted to branch out into painting and sculpture and try different mediums. Like so many others, Allen reached out to Kent, whom he’d met a few years prior, and Kent gave him studio space, where he worked for three years.

“I didn’t go to MICA or any of that,” Allen says. “I hung with local rappers, I used to hang at the Crown, but I didn’t really know any artists. When I started experimenting with sculpture, I reached out to Jeffrey because he was one of the few artists I knew who worked in different mediums. I started playing with charcoal, I would sit and watch him paint, just to learn. But from there, he taught me how to make editions, how to sell art, how to price my work, and that led to him curating my first mixed-media show.

“I’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s not perfect,’ and Jeffrey was that vehicle that assured me that it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needed to be great. He’d be like, ‘This is important work. Do it.’”

The mixed-media show, Spaces of the UnEntitled, was installed at The Peale museum in 2019. It was Allen’s first time showing color photographs, as well as multi-media performance art, a component created by Kent and Allen together.

“That was the show that showed people, ‘Oh, he’s able to move into these other spaces.’ It transformed the way people looked at my art and what I was capable of doing,” Allen says.

The exhibit was equally as meaningful for The Peale, where Kent serves as chief curator.

“From the beginning, I wanted the programming at The Peale to be driven by the community, and here was Jeffrey coming to us as a community creator who had a story to tell with Devin, so we were very happy to put The Peale at his disposal,” says Nancy Proctor, chief strategy officer and founding director of The Peale. “The show was important, at that point in The Peale’s history, for getting the museum back on the cultural map. It had been shuttered for 20 years. Most people forgot it had even existed.”

 

“I TELL PEOPLE I’M A SELFISH GIVER,” KENT SAYS. “I GET SOMETHING OUT OF EVERYTHING I DO.”

 

Kent proposed a second show, work by Baltimore street artist Adam Stab, which he mounted later that year. By 2020, he was invited to be part of the leadership team. Proctor credits Kent’s vision as being instrumental in the rebranding and rethinking of The Peale’s mission. That year also saw the launch of Accomplished Art Apprentices, an initiative Kent founded at The Peale that allows young, marginalized men to learn the ins and outs of working in the art business—everything from handling, installing, and wrapping art to learning historical preservation techniques, mastering power tools, gaining financial literacy, and identifying best COVID policies and practices. Kent personally teaches some portions of the program but also hires other professionals to lead sessions when needed.

The first four apprentices who went through the 36-week pilot worked alongside a team of contractors who were renovating The Peale and were paid $20 an hour. Two of them have gone on to start their own business.

Kent has also recently become an adjunct professor at his alma mater, teaching MICA’s First Year Experience. He shares with freshmen what he’s learned over a handful of decades—not just painting techniques but how to be confident in your work and how to grow thicker skin, even if influential figures in the art world visit your studio and tell you your paintings are “too dusty” or your signature is “too large” (yes, Kent was told both of those things).

One might think Kent’s own art gets lost among his many other involvements, but he makes time to get into the studio every day.

Everything is thought out well ahead of putting paint to canvas, down to his signature—which, like most of the text in his pieces, is written backwards, not just a nod to his dyslexia but to give viewers the experience of having dyslexia by forcing them to slow down in order to read.

His conceptually oriented work explores social and political history, systemic racism, and groupthink, including the ways in which commodities are marketed and societal systems erected. The amount of thought behind each piece gives them multiple layers of meaning—and, often, mediums.

Following his passions and curiosity has broadened his career, reputation, and mind. In fact, there’s very little Kent hasn’t tried—in the art world and in his own art.

“I tell people I’m a selfish giver,” he says. “I get something out of everything I do. I only do something if I want to do it.”

On that note, he’s worked with nearly every material imaginable, from the more traditional (charcoal, acrylic) to the more experimental (shredded money, bricolage, and, currently, a technique he’s not yet revealed publicly). Even within a series, he’s likely to include several mediums.

He no longer has extra studio space for artists because all of his home studios are currently occupied by his own works in progress—a different medium in each room. Yet, he’s still exploring new ideas, whether it’s launching a nonprofit or venturing into a new medium.

Meanwhile, his spray-painted mural of a backwards, upside-down flag—a distress signal he painted when Donald Trump was elected, he says—runs along the length and width of his entire long and narrow house.

“I haven’t tried oil yet,” he says. “I’m gonna try that next.”

After dropping out of college (twice), Jerrell Gibbs worked as a home health aide while he and his wife raised their daughter in Baltimore County. For a while, he worked a day shift and a night shift simultaneously to provide for his family. During one of those night shifts, he found himself looking at a picture in his phone of his wife and daughter, and, on a whim, started sketching it—something he hadn’t done since he was a kid. Then he sent the finished drawing to his wife.

“I got it and was like, ‘Who drew this?’” Sheila Gibbs remembers, laughing. “It came to me by surprise. I was impressed. I was like, okay this could be a little something. Because we were newly married and struggling financially, I was like, ‘Why don’t you start tattooing or something, make us some more money?’”

Gibbs took his wife’s advice to heart and delved more deeply into sketching and also began designing tattoos. Noticing her husband’s growing interest, Sheila bought him an easel and art supplies the following year for Father’s Day, which furthered his new “hobby.” Not only did he begin experimenting with the practice of painting, he devoured books and other materials to learn as much as he could on the subject.

“I really started to get excited about being passionate about something other than football,” Gibbs recalls. “I just kept doing it, day in and day out, spending as much time and money as I could on painting. I just fell in love with it.”

Fast-forward seven years and Gibbs, now 34, has refined his craft through formal and informal mentorship, earned an MFA, acquired representation through the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, and solidified a reputation for his soulful portraiture that captures Black American life. Most recently, he was selected to paint a portrait of Elijah Cummings, which hung at the Baltimore Museum of Art before moving to its permanent location inside the Capitol building. It’s likely just one of what will be many milestones in Gibbs’ career.

Gibbs has a distinct style, a penchant for conveying deep emotion and the various expressions of Black culture and experience through loose, fluid brushstrokes. But he didn’t start there.

When asked if he was exposed to art growing up in West Baltimore, Gibbs laughs. There were no artists in his family and little to no access to the art world that he’s now a part of. But in retrospect, he noticed from an early age that his doodles weren’t like those by other kids.

“What I was creating didn’t look anything like other people’s creations,” he says from his home in Baltimore County. “I always knew there was something there, but I didn’t have the community or the means to nurture that.”

When he dove back into art in his twenties, he would, piece by piece, find that community, as he connected with other artists and began showing work, initially at small venues like CCBC Essex, Howard University, and Dovecote Café.

When Jeffrey Kent, something of a Baltimore icon and mentor for emerging artists, first met Gibbs, he was still working as a medical aide and, as Kent remembers, painting “Peanuts” characters—specifically Franklin, the Black character in the comic strip. Gibbs reached out to Kent several times over the course of months, until the older artist finally agreed to meet with him

“Jerrell is very persistent and very goal-driven. And I guess at the time, his goal was to meet with me,” Kent says with a laugh. “We met at Red Emma’s, and he told me, quite frankly, he wanted me to be his mentor.”

Kent was renting out studios for a low rate and invited Gibbs to utilize a space in his building, which would become Gibbs’ first studio. Kent also gave him some pointers—how to conduct himself as an artist, how to navigate the art world. Soon after, Gibbs quit his day job and began studying at Maryland Institute College of Art.

“Here’s a Black man in Baltimore, married at 26 with a daughter, and his wife is 100 percent in support of him quitting and becoming an artist,” Kent recalls in amazement. “I’m like, and you’re painting ‘Peanuts’ characters? [His family] deserves every bit of success they’re getting because of the sacrifices they have made for him to be where he is.”

Despite never completing a bachelor’s degree, Gibbs was accepted into MICA’s master’s program at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting and started in the fall of 2018.

“It was immediately obvious that Jerrell was very focused and disciplined, very together, always working hard, and very artistically ambitious,” says MICA painting professor Stephen Ellis. Ellis remembers taking Gibbs and the rest of his class to see the Henri Matisse paintings at the BMA and watching the young man’s work evolve almost overnight. “He just absorbed the lesson in those paintings and applied it to his own work in literally a matter of days. It was amazing,” he says.

Gibbs, who had mostly been working with acrylics, began using, then mastering, oil paint and “never looked back.” Also while still a student, four of his paintings were selected for inclusion in the 2019 show “Blackface: A Reclamation of Beauty, Power, and Narrative” at Galerie Myrtis, which proved to be pivotal for his career.

Jessica Stafford Davis, who co-curated the exhibit with gallery owner Myrtis Bedolla, had met Gibbs years prior and suggested him as an artist to include. “As we did studio visits and he shared the narrative behind his work and these wonderful images of Black life, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this kid is genius,’” Bedolla says.

The first piece in the show to sell was his—an oil painting titled “Git It” that depicted a grandmother dancing. His remaining three paintings sold immediately, too, and people began asking for more.

“I really admire his conscious effort to depict Black families at leisure,” says Bedolla. “A lot of what’s addressed in Black art is about our fight against oppression and racism. Jerrell brings another important conversation but one that reminds us of our humanity, our leisure, our play, and that’s a part of our culture that also needs to be shared. His work is a reflection of humanity, and my hope is that people of all races and cultures and belief systems will see themselves in it.”

Stafford Davis echoes that sentiment and notes that his collectors cross generational and geographical lines. “I think it’s because the subject of the work is universal,” she says.

Gibbs’ online bio alludes to this universality, stating, “Gibbs invigorates banal representations of Black identity by depicting empathy, inviting the possibility for a spiritual connection.”

When talking about his process for painting portraits, Gibbs describes something akin to an actor getting into character—and perhaps it’s through this personal process that he’s able to capture something transcendent.

“It’s about me,” he says, simply. “That’s why there’s so much emotion within the figures in the paintings, because I’m placing myself into their space. I’m thinking about myself and whatever I’m going through and allowing the figure to be the avatar for me, whether it’s male or female. . . . It’s almost like becoming the thing, becoming the person, in order to relay the message.”

After Gibbs was commissioned by the BMA to paint the portrait of Elijah Cummings, he read articles online about the congressman, as well as Cummings’ 2020 book We’re Better Than This in preparation. He had long conversations with Cummings’ widow, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings. He watched YouTube videos of Cummings speaking and paid close attention to his disposition, even if it was a clip of him sitting in an audience.

“Becoming the person,” Gibbs repeats. “I wanted to see, hear, and find out who this person was to the best of my ability. I wanted to become Elijah Cummings so I could portray his true essence.”

Certainly, Gibbs’ demonstration of skill and technique in portraiture caught the attention of the BMA selection committee, but it was more than that.

“I thought about his trajectory,” says Kent, a committee member. “The other artists were just as talented, but Jerrell was the only one represented by a gallerist, he was already being collected by museums, and these things were moving him into the world stage, as we’re seeing now. And also his work ethic. It’s unmatched.”

Gibbs says his successes have come through routine, which keeps him grounded and focused. He wasn’t always so structured. Around 2016, something the motivational speaker Eric Thomas said caught his attention.

“He was talking about taking advantage of the opportunities that you have in the time that you have, and I realized that a lot of my losses were coming from the fact that I wasn’t intentional about the hours in my day,” Gibbs recalls. “Right then in that moment, I made an intentional shift about the time I was spending with my craft, with my family, with my friends, with myself. I just got really specific about not wasting a lot of time.”

On weekdays, for instance, he takes his daughter to school, works out, then spends four to five hours painting in his current space at Parkdale Studios. He also makes time every other day to be tutored in French—a practice he began after gaining representation from Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which has locations in Chicago and Paris. He wanted to learn the language so he’d be able to conduct a basic conversation, especially when, in September, his work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the gallery’s Paris location.

In April, Gibbs went to Paris for the first time, along with his wife and daughter. As he immersed himself in the culture, something funny happened.

“What really struck me while I was in Paris was that I started to love Baltimore that much more,” he says. “I saw what makes Paris special—the architecture, the cuisine, the artwork, the Louvre, everybody walking around smoking cigarettes, people eating outside. It was beautiful. They even display the macarons in a way that was creative. This is why people love to go there. Why do people like going to Baltimore?”

He thought about that a lot. And after reminiscing and waxing nostalgic about his favorite pastimes back home—visits with his grandma, getting crabs from Lexington Market—he thought, what better way to express his love for his home city than to share his Baltimore with Paris.

Gibbs was preparing to return to Paris and work on his exhibit for a full month in June (our interview was conducted in May). Among croissants and macarons, he planned to make paintings of blue crabs. With the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre as his backdrop, he would capture West Baltimore and folks sitting on stoops and enjoying backyard barbecues.

“I was thinking about what I really appreciate about an artist and realized the artists that I gravitate to always tell me about their experiences and where they’re from,” Gibbs says. “I’m thinking about Kanye West. His first album, The College Dropout, he was talking about Chicago and his upbringing and experiences. Jay-Z, same thing. Kendrick Lamar talking about L.A., talking about Compton. J. Cole talking about North Carolina. I fell in love with them because of that. So why wouldn’t I bring Baltimore to Paris and talk about all the beauty that is here?”

From the mid-16th century through the late 18th century, the transatlantic slave trade transported millions of enslaved African people across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold for labor at ports across Latin America, North America, and the West Indies. Despite being uprooted from their native lands and dispersed across thousands of miles, cultural traditions were retained and passed down intergenerationally into modern day.

The Mare Projects art collective aims to explore that history and the dissemination of black art, culture, and community around the world through a new, nomadic residency program for emerging artists from Baltimore and beyond.

“I wanted to create a dialogue,” says curator Tiffany Auttrianna Ward, who conceived the project with scholars Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Tatiane Schilaro Santa Rosa. “Anti-blackness is internalized in the ways that we speak about the cities that we are from, especially if they are known for being black. A residency is a beautiful way to get people to learn about our differences and our [shared] experiences.”

During the initial residency, which took place in August and was hosted in collaboration with mTkalla Keaton, creative director of Sunspots Studio in West Baltimore, Mare commissioned Dominican artist Raelis Vasquez and Baltimore-based African-Americanartist Jerrell Gibbs to create new works that consider real and imagined visualizations of family through the diasporic lens, with selections now on view at Gallery CA from September 13 to October 13.

Both Vasquez and Gibbs are celebrated for their austere and expressive portraits of African-American and Afro-LatinX families, young adults, and children. The artists situate their subjects in intimate interiors and warmly rendered community spaces, with the resultant paintings standing as affirming counter-narratives against negative representations of black communities.

In Vasquez’s “La Vecina del Pueblo de Dios,” an oil work on canvas, for example, an unknown woman seated in a rocking chair lovingly feeds a small infant in a humble rural landscape, reminiscent of Catholic iconography that features the Virgin Mary holding Christ. In Gibbs’ “Window Seat,” an oil and acrylic work on canvas, an anonymous woman sits in a posh living room while two toddlers play behind her. Both works explore black motherhood as a mundane and sacred experience.

Ward hopes that the works created during the residency will spark critical dialogs about identity and culture. Although launched in Baltimore, future iterations will take place in host spaces in cities and countries across the diaspora.

“It’s about bringing us back together,” says Ward. “It’s about seeing each other and appreciating ourselves through our own lenses.”

Three years ago, artist Jerrell Gibbs was developing a series of acrylic paintings that revised characters from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts. Gibbs mimicked Schultz’s playful illustrative style, but created nuanced narratives that centered around the life and experiences of Franklin, a silent African-American characterization. His paintings reminded us that—while Franklin’s inclusion was well-meaning—his silence, lack of character development, and nonexistent independent story arc were telling reflections about a culture that normalized banal representations of black identity.

As Gibbs now studies in the rigorous Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting M.F.A. program at MICA, the scenes he chooses to visualize reflect broad humanizing narratives about mundane instances in black life: smiling children watching television or swimming, young women posing for prom pictures, mothers and young sons sharing intimate conversations on a couch. In these works, Gibbs engages a mature style that meanders between intricately rendered realist figurations and free-form gestural strokes reminiscent of works by artists like Alice Neal, Henry Taylor or John Sonsini.

Some of his newest paintings are currently on view at Ida B’s Table through January 31, 2019, as part of the restaurant’s monthly rotating exhibit, Necessary Tomorrows. We got a chance to visit Gibbs in his studio to view his latest series of oil work on canvas and discuss how his work has evolved over the years.

What inspired this body of work and the evolution in your work?

School and me challenging myself to be a student of all the things I want to master. I want to do this for the rest of my life. If I continue down this path, I want to evolve and dive into the practice of painting and learn what it is to be a really significant artist. I want to continue to grow, master my craft, and be a student of the game first. I’m taking the time to research a lot of the things I have learned in school and figure out ways to get better. Even if it’s not something that is easily recognizable, I know overtime that it is something that will start to manifest.

In many of your portraits, you use very gestural style that leaves sections blank or less realized than others. Why does this aesthetic recur in this new series?

Me not knowing the individual [in the paintings] forced me to not want to get too involved with every minute detail. I don’t think that was necessarily important. The person wasn’t important. It was the environment, the space, and the reaction—everything that was given besides the actual person. The emotion of the imagery, that was what was important. I’m working on not being bogged down by detail.

For “Studying God’s Word,” in particular, it’s unfinished but so is youth. The whole idea of growing up and continuing to learn and taking what you know and applying it to what and who you are at that moment in your life and continuing to shed other things, layers, adding subtraction. That whole notion of youth, growing, maturing is like a play with that whole dialogue. Also just showing the layers of people. We are all a work in progress and so is this painting.

When you were first playing with allowing underpainting to bleed through, there was something about it that didn’t feel as fully resolved as it does now. There’s something about it that feels like a homage to black memory. Is that your intention?

Absolutely. It’s a way to allow the process to be shown just so it can have a dialogue with what it is to be human, continuing to be vulnerable, being okay with the process, and figuring out a way to allow the undertone to function. To pay homage from where you come from and how you’ve allowed those things to mold and shape you into the being that you are. It’s bigger than just showing it, there is a function, a reason for how it operates within each piece. It’s not necessary for every painting, but when it necessary I know when to incorporate it.

It’s refreshing and very powerful that you focus on the innocence and humanity of black youth.

It’s something that I’ve been working with for years. Even though the body of work had changed, the contexts with which I place these people is strategic. Normalizing us being and existing. Everybody isn’t an entertainer, everybody doesn’t have to be glorified for their contribution to America in its entirety, just being you is enough. I want to acknowledge that and bring that presence to museums, galleries, and people so that they can view these experiences.