How do you balance structure and improvisation in your artistic process? 

I feel like, in quilting there’s a style everyone goes for: the same look, the same florals, the same solid colors, the patterns. Coming into fiber arts, I definitely wanted to break that. I wanted to make my own language, my own verbiage, to make people really nervous. 

Going from the institution into the professional realm, exhibiting my work more, has definitely changed my mindset.

When I came on the scene, I thought, I’m not following the rules of quilting. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I’m adding my abstract sketches, I’m making my own textiles. My first exhibition at Playground Detroit was all black quilts. I think I came on the scene with a vision of what I wanted to see and how I wanted my work to come across to an audience. At heart, I’m definitely a perfectionist. 

That’s my advice for my students now. Go into a project with a vision. You might execute it, it might not come out the way you want it to: you change it, you alter it. 

In your quilts, you use abstraction to explore very complicated concepts of Black identity, culture, heritage and family, even legacy. How did you come to turn to abstraction specifically? 

I’ve always been fascinated with abstraction. As a child, I would go to the art museum with my parents, and only really be interested in the abstract sections. Representational art has always felt very boring to me. No slight to those artists, there are many I look up to and admire. I just think abstraction is different. It’s a challenge to witness and to work in, to formulate a style within. 

For me… let me go back. My parents were very protective of me and my brothers. There were certain things we couldn’t look at on TV growing up. We were raised in religion. As an adult, I feel like I still want a lot of my stories to be protected. I don’t want to give all my information out to the world to judge or to make a mockery of. Abstraction is a way for me to have a protective layer on top, but to still say my stuff. 

In graduate school I wasn’t naming my pieces, but now that I’m working in abstraction more I want to guide the audience, to give them some sense of what I’m referencing. It took me a long time to come to that realization, that I have to, to give somebody something. Not that I get offended if someone comes to one of my exhibitions and doesn't get what I’m saying at all. I think my intention as an abstract artist is to create in a way that allows the audience to formulate their own associations. 

You had an exhibition recently, at the Tube Factory in Indianapolis. You described it as a reflection of the Black church experience in the 1990s. 

Like I said, we were raised in church, we went to Sunday school, went to Bible study. As an adult, and especially since Covid, church is more virtual. People don’t go to church as much. It just doesn’t feel like it used to. 

That’s what I was thinking about in this exhibition: expressing my feelings, this sense of nostalgia. From my perspective, the music, the gospel music, is not how it was. In the churches I went to as a child, they would wear choir robes. It was packed. 

I never thought I would be speaking about religion through my artistic practice. It never came to mind. It kind of just hit me one night, to just do it and to see what people think. 

I’m actually working on another exhibition, which is opening in January at Wabash college. 

I wanted it to be the last of the religion, to wrap up, take a break from it and to regroup and get my thoughts together. But the works are stunning. I love how they look. I’m very happy with the outcome. It’s definitely a step up from my exhibition this year. The works are larger in scale; they’re more experimentative. I’m adding more, I think I’m pushing myself conceptually with these pieces, playing with shape - which I didn’t really do before, I was playing it safe. 

How do you interact with the broader art marketplace? What do you collect? How do you collect?

Some artists have suggested trading work - Detroit artists that I love -, so I can start building my personal art collection through that. I think collecting art in that way is great for building confidence and for meeting people that you might feel are unapproachable otherwise. Artists that are represented by major galleries often seem intimidating - like big-time, big deal artists -, but I’ve gotten to know some that are very nice, very open.