This is my newest piece of art- my very own face mask. It’s not for wearing outside, though—I made it in honor of my ancestors.

The idea came from a visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) to see and write a BMoreArt review of A Perfect Power, their newest exhibition on African objects. While there, I briefly took off my own mask to wipe my face, and the guards quickly reminded me to put it back on. It got me thinking about the changing meaning of masks through societies and history. The masks in the exhibition, for instance, were all worn by men but were made to call on a higher mother power, a creative force that reigns supreme in the matrifocal cultures in Africa. Were they always worn by men, though? Or did that change with colonization and the subsequent gender roles it assigned onto different societies? When, in other words, were women shamed for being fully present in a public sphere?
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The lead cultural consultant for the show, Yoruba scholar Dr. Oyeronke Oyewumi, told me in my interview with her that Yoruba society didn’t use gender in the same way the West does- instead, social roles were designated through seniority.

As for why I’m posting this right now? It’s because of a story that the BMA curator told me about the Ivory Coast, where 40,000 women bared their chests (or wore leaves, or all black) in order to end The Second Ivorian Civil War. Also, if white people can show their whole ass by storming the Capitol, then a little body paint and censored boob action shouldn’t hurt anybody.

By posting this, I’m honoring my fellow body painter and friend (Kitakiya Dennis), a dear spiritual ancestor that frequently used body paint (Michael B. Platt), and my own roots/indigeniety from Mother Africa herself, which I’m still in the process of discovering. The show is no longer open to the public, but the books and writings germane to the profiled societies are available to rent or buy online. I highly recommend Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women, a text that has been celebrated by activist Alok Vaid Menon and others. Ashe and onward.
 
(The D’mba array, the crown jewel of the show, is from the Baga people of Guinea.)

​The final (Zoom) installment of the Youth Council’s was about time management. In other words, how do they manage the most precious resource they’ll ever have?

To start, I asked them to do a list of 10 tasks in eight minutes- find out the first weather satellite, or do 10 jumping jacks, or even find and share the link to their favorite recipe. Anna won, doing all of the tasks- but the other two weren’t that far behind. They all prioritized the tasks differently, picking stuff that was quickest or easiest for them.
Next, I had them think about how a highly successful person (Ahmad Woodard brought up Michael Jordan) spends a day-think a 1998 playoffs game, Bulls against the Utah Jazz. We came up with a likely schedule of his day together. When did he get up (5am)? Practice (6am-time of game)? Or press conference (10 minutes)? We deduced that someone as busy as he was wouldn’t have much time for social media or niceties-his focus was on the game.

Finally, we each made a pie chart of our regular day, examined what we had to do, and determined if each action in that day built towards the future that we wanted. During this exercise, Mark and Anna mentioned the time other mentors gave to them, too.

I’m glad that they chose to spend time with me. Plus, they’ve helped me learn so much about my own priorities these past few weeks. The kids will be alright. 

​The Youth Council managed to meet this week, after all.
The staff Project Create DC started up Zoom, and smushed all of our faces together for our first virtual tour of a museum.

The popular choice was NMAAHC. The website experience was different from the Instagram-like, teachers on one side, youth on the other- but you learn different things at different places for a reason.
On the website, we looked at a manifesto authored by #BayardRustin and #CesarChavez- blue in English, black in Spanish, signatures out big as John Hancock’s, owning all of that front page.

We of course talked about lots of artifacts, but just as importantly, we talked about our daily lives and what surrounds us while we’re living them. Anna showed off her custom designed wall in her house, a cube that Shannelle started painting, and everybody made some slight fun of Mark for getting left behind at a past museum trip (he stayed with us this time, though.) Anna, who had the energy to do softball, volleyball, and play Cinderella as a kid kept that same energy while we we were all on Zoom, and it helped make the class special.
While we were traveling #apeoplesjourney on IG, we talked about Queen Latifah’s key, Run DMC’s Kangol, Aretha’s long furs. Sometimes, with our own history, it brands us (like the story behind the key); or, artists can brand history (Applebottoms,etc.) Finally, we landed on something that I thought was a #NormanLewis painting- but it was the pieces of the #Clotilde, the last slave ship to wreck itself in America. I showed the youth council Norman’s work, of Klans members or of white flags fluttering against the pitch dark.

Ultimately, I tried to get them to think about how leaders either take ownership of or subvert a story altogether. It’s an important skill. Stay tuned.

​For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping the Youth Council at Project Create DC. Talking with them about their past experiences, what kind of environment they want Project Create to be for everyone else, stuff like that.

The Council members range in age from 17-24 and come from all over DC. I’m pretty clear with them that my role isn’t to tell them what to do (‘cause they grown, and know it) but to guide them in figuring out how their past and present lessons will help them in the future. I write stuff down; they draw some art-creative juices flow.

So, in this last session, we talked a lot about the ‘rules’ that this council wanted for the rest of the students at Project Create, which they use to govern themselves. I capped it off at 10.
Of course, the golden rule- that of respect- topped the list.
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The others included:
1. Clean up after yourself
2. Judgmental behavior not allowed
3. No bullying
4. Spread love
5. Keep your language PG
6. Encourage creativity and self-expression
7. Be open and verbalize your thoughts and feelings, appropriately, depending where you are and who you’re with
8. Acknowledge people as you come and go in a room; and
9. Keep going.

Alongside rules, we talked about what success and its alter ego, failure, was to them. Besides getting better at something that you once was bad at, they defined it as an experience relative to themselves personally, as opposed to proving something to the outside world. It can sometimes mean destruction of something, which can allow for another, new, thing to take its place.

This group will meet with me for the next month or so. I’m excited to see what we talk about next. Stay tuned.

Photos courtesy of Shanelle.

From Michael Platt's place- painting by Sam Burwell. I like how it plays with light and dark color values. What do you think it is? Hint is in the title.

There are lots of ways to interpret the meaning of decay.
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It can mean the process of something being ruined, or the thing itself being ruined. It can indicate a decline in standards, of faculties. It can be eye catching, and beautiful only as an accident, not end goal.

This piece, by Titus Kaphar, mummifies a vague approximation of our Founding Fathers, their identities and secrets wrapped up tight. Since they're blind to the world around them, they stumble forward, playing a part while falling apart.

We Are One/Never Again (redux.) The world today needs to relax and love, and forget hate.

Who would you guess the woman in the middle is? Oh, I'll just go ahead and tell you- it's Misty Copeland!

Special thanks to Hedieh Illchi , Adam Chamy, Negar Ahkami , Josh Uresky and Zoe Cohen for helping me find the words. Showing at Susquehanna Art Museum , in 'Vessels' show (co-juried by Sun Young Kang), next month.

First off, I haven't written anything like this in nearly two years.  I wonder why I didn't do this sooner.  I feel excited to show you an overview of my greatest hits.  As for the title, it's an attempt to capture all of the ways I've experienced the world.  When  I think of the seventh sense, it really isn't connected to a physical or social appendage or boundary- instead, it's more or a feeling, a form of self-discovery, that I was very lucky to develop during the course of this past year.  

So, I've traveled miles in my inner and outer world: starting and completing a 360-degree mural within 5 months, making and publishing new works out into the world, and all-too-briefly contributing to the opening of the greatest monument to African Americans in recent or distant memory.

I'm still looking for a permanent studio location, but I'm happy with the things I've made while on the run!

And next- pictures!


The first set shows the outcome of a community mural I did in partnership with Arlington Arts Center (www.arlingtonartscenter.org).  The mural, in a nutshell, is a partial autobiography on my past year and shifting of physical place, in visual/allegorical form.  Loosely put, there is chaos at the very beginning, then a period of intense confusion and liberation of past demons and situations, all leading up to a gradual lifting of my spirits and my inner life.  I left Philadelphia with very little to show for it; with the help of new friends and experiences down in DC, I've found a new, better outlook to replace what I've lost.  

A friend of mine once compared the progress of the mural to Scherezade and the 1001 Nights- that every dawn, in order to keep her head, she needed to tell a new and interesting twist on the story that she paused the day before. With my own visual story, I wanted to focus less on factual objects and more on the subjectivity of memory, the passage and creation of energy- and ultimately the shaping and direction of a constantly evolving living narrative.  After I finished it, I painted  over and destroyed the various elements of the mural on August 28th, 2016.  The mural, like so much of my work, has passed on into digital memory (photographs below).  

Each person that helped me create this mural, who ventured to add their own individual voice to it, has my gratitude.   Rachel, Diana, Sam, Adam, Leo, Gyasi, Yuri, Minna, Alanna, Hillary, about a hundred or so others, and last but not least- my very excellent friend/mentor, Meei Ling Ng- were alll crucial to the making (and destruction) of this piece.  Main takeaway of this is- when people work together, wonderful things happen!

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About the senses- they help me understand the world on an factual level- the five senses can smell the air, hear a bird call, attempt to touch the sky, recognize itself in a mirror, taste a new dish.  The sixth sense is the title of a movie, and also calls to an intution that goes beyond what we can recognize empirically- that of the spirit.  And the seventh is basically the moment when you see all of these senses together, and say, "Oh!  This is me!".  Self-awareness, in other words.  

Most of these works in the next slide show were done in the last 2 months, and are avaliable for sale.  Contact me if interested. 

Finally,  serendipity played a big part in how I received a commission with National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)/Google.

Back in June, I hosted a live concert in my studio- the same studio with the large mural above!- which was part of an music series called Sofar Sounds (www.sofarsounds.com/washington).   They play in different private venues all over DC (and the world!) and the local team chose my studio at Arlington Arts to play one night. Cue 3 hours of violin, guitar, voices that swelled and soothed.  Also,  I met a person there that was connected to the opening of the NMAAHC, and voila!  I was offered a chance to design a skin for Google's new virtual reality unit, Google Cardboard.  One thousand total units were made, and distributed during NMAAHCs opening events.  I'm very humbled and grateful to be a tiny part of black history.  

All told, the past few months were amazing, wonderful, full of growth and change, and an overall push for me to be the best version of myself.  Once again, I am grateful for all of the things that developing my seventh sense has helped me obtain, and I'm looking for future means of development- as well as more projects!  

With love,

​Lyric

 After a year-long hiatus, I come away with a new home, a new city, and a perspective on a challange that I came up upon when I decided to relocate to a more expensive location.  

The studio crisis.  It’s a multi-leveled thing.  

And it sucks.  And it’s relentless, and it’s a symptom of the larger change that regulates the death and life of our American cities .  President Obama, in 2008, talked about change that we could believe in.  Eight years later, artists in particular are seeing that such change is a force that we can direct and influence, but not completely control.  The accelerated production rate of the world now, as opposed to in our ancestors’ time, means that huge changes that they would anticipate over the space of decades can happen now within a few years.   And through these changes, we hold on to the belief that we have first realized in childhood- that we can make our inner worlds and fantasies real for others to see.

Over the past year, there has been a great deal of change in my life.  I’ve been forced out of my last place in Philadelphia because my landlord wanted to raise the rent and  leave the broken apartment locks and window in disrepair, and I lost the roommates that was helping me pay for it all.  I also lost most of my possessions (except my art) when I made the move down here.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I came to D.C. wearing little more than the clothes on my back and some of my works strapped there along with them.  

Being here, despite the greater opportunities, does not necessarily translate to less injustice.    The larger forces that influence the daily lives of all great  American cities- economics, politics, social justice- all seem to be amplified in D.C.  The stakes are higher, and the losses potentially steeper.  And with the heightened nature of the situation, the results are wider spread and more drastic for those less inoculated against the forces of change.  

Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Breakfast of Champions, illustrates this by using islands and air balloons.


Every bit of land...was owned by only about forty people, and...those people decided to exercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything. This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore. But then the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big balloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn't own property. There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each balloon. With the help of the balloons, [landless people] could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned. (101)

At this particular moment, we artists are being handed out balloons, filled with hot air, meant to take us far, far away.  

I honestly don’t know much about the inner details of the gentrification process in D.C.  I know that it is disproportionately affecting people that look like me and have deeper roots here than I do.  I know that there are white, brown, and tan people that are also facing low-priced buyouts and high penalties of moving and restarting somewhere else, away from the places and communities that they know and love.   And I can personally attest that losing your sense of home, being rejected and ejected from the place that you put all of the time and effort into building, is hard, hard indeed.  But survivable.  

As it is right now, I have my beautiful studio in AAC until June 20th.  After that, I will have to put my stuff in storage once again, strap what I can onto my back, and keep moving.  Somewhere. *

Knowing that I need to move on is hurtful, but freeing.  It reminds me that the things I hold dear are just that, things.   Not me or my ability to create.   Over the past few weeks, I’ve been illustrating this cycle of creation and destruction with a mural in my temporary studio, that will be completely painted over when I move out.  I have decided to dedicate it to gentrification.  Not just because it will be crowdsourced by a community of people that visit the wall to contribute art, and tended to by me; but also because, like the sprawling neighborhoods and cultures that have grown up along with them, it will change form and structure over time, and finally be rolled over and remade into someone else’s image.  I have a limited amount of control of when that will be, and how that will happen- a joke compared to the levels of control that people in gentrifying communities face.  And I won’t pretend, once again, that I am intimately entrenched with the landowner/renter struggles here.  Instead, I can only offer the empathy of seeing a work that I and many others put a great deal of time and love into be eroded into nothing for us, and something new for someone else.  This is not happy or sad.  This is change.


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With this loss, however, comes a new challenge, the opposite of comfort, safety and stagnation, a new opportunity to create and to believe in the future.  Artists often create under pressure and few resources, and are the ones that can truly transform a place of fear and raw potential into a thing of beauty.  It is a gift that we give to the world, that works in favor of the landlords and landowners that are the agents of this change.   However, it is also the thing that no one can take from us, and the thing that, deep down, our opposites wish they had.  And we also have the ability to change the way we advocate and own for ourselves.  Without belief, we have no hope to manage change.  Without change, we would have no need to believe and forge new boundaries.  One regenerates the other, and the cycle continues.

*Update-  I have worked out a plan with the staff to continue staying at the AAC, part-time, until the end of the summer.  I will keep the mural up until September 2nd- I hope to add great things to it and expand the conversation about change, art, and audience participation.  Thanks, AAC staff, for being awesome!-  LP