Visual Inquiry
Visual Inquiry uses image, typography, assemblage, and visual systems as methods of cultural investigation.
Visual Inquiry explores the use of image, typography, assemblage, and visual systems as methods of cultural investigation. These works operate at the intersection of artistic practice, cultural analysis, and scholarly inquiry, using visual form to examine questions of identity, memory, race, language, perception, and the construction of meaning.
Rather than functioning as illustrations, these projects are conceived as visual arguments—sites where research, observation, personal experience, and cultural memory converge. Through digital collage, typographic intervention, conceptual design, and visual experimentation, each work invites viewers to consider how histories are encoded, how identities are constructed, and how meaning emerges through acts of interpretation.
Together, these works reflect an ongoing commitment to understanding visual culture as a mode of inquiry capable of generating knowledge, revealing hidden relationships, and making visible the social, historical, and affective forces that shape human experience.
What'due Say? (2023)
Overview
What'due Say? is a typographic artwork that examines the power of language in the construction of racial identity and social meaning. Layering racial slurs, stereotypes, cultural references, and historical markers, the work confronts viewers with the linguistic residue of racialized experience in the United States while simultaneously inviting deeper reflection on memory, identity, and representation.
Embedded within the composition are multiple messages, including references to the Thirteenth Amendment and Nina Simone's song Four Women, creating a visual field in which language functions as both historical evidence and cultural artifact.
Context
Created as an intellectual interlude within my master's thesis, Marked: The Racialization of African Phenotypes and the Creation of an Embodied Archive, the work served as a visual counterpart to the thesis's broader exploration of race, embodiment, and the social construction of identity. Rather than operating as illustration, the piece functions as a form of visual cultural criticism, asking viewers to confront the ways language shapes perception and becomes embedded within collective memory.
Reflection
What'due Say? represents an important moment in the development of my interdisciplinary practice. The work emerged from a desire to think critically through visual form, using typography and design as tools for cultural analysis. It explores how language can both wound and define, how stereotypes persist across generations, and how historical narratives become embedded within everyday forms of communication.
Many of the questions raised by this work continue to inform my research and creative practice, particularly my interest in embodied archives, cultural memory, visual semiotics, and the ways individuals navigate inherited systems of meaning. The piece reflects an ongoing commitment to using artistic forms as methods of inquiry and public engagement.
Hidden Phrase (2023)
Overview
Hidden Phrase is an interactive typographic work that invites viewers to engage in an act of discovery. Through a series of clues, references, and coded associations, the piece asks participants to decipher a concealed phrase embedded within the work. The process of interpretation becomes as important as the answer itself, requiring the viewer to move between language, philosophy, symbolism, and cultural knowledge.
Context
Created as an intellectual interlude within my master's thesis, Marked: The Racialization of African Phenotypes and the Creation of an Embodied Archive, the work functioned as a pause in the traditional academic narrative. Rather than presenting information directly, it asked readers to become active participants in meaning-making and knowledge production.
Reflection
The phrase "What is, I am a man" emerges through a process of decoding and discovery. Created within the context of my master's thesis, Marked: The Racialization of African Phenotypes and the Creation of an Embodied Archive, the work invites viewers to move through systems of language, classification, and interpretation before arriving at a statement of personhood.
Looking back, the piece reflects an early engagement with questions that continue to shape my interdisciplinary practice: how identities are constructed, how individuals are marked and categorized, and how meaning emerges through acts of interpretation. Situated within a larger inquiry into race, embodiment, and cultural memory, the work suggests a movement beyond systems of classification toward a more fundamental assertion of human presence.
Many of these concerns would later re-emerge in projects such as Black Dance: A Collage of Embodied Language Systems, Conversations with Rothko, and my ongoing research on embodied archives. What began as an interactive conceptual puzzle has become, for me, an exploration of recognition, embodiment, and the enduring question of what remains when social categories are stripped away.
Visual Essays
Digital collage as a method of cultural analysis.
Hair No Evil I (2023)
Overview
Hair No Evil I is a digital collage that examines Black hair as both cultural artifact and embodied archive. Through the layering of natural and manipulated hairstyles, floral abstraction, and the symbolic presence of the cowrie shell, the work explores the ways identity, memory, and cultural knowledge become inscribed upon and transmitted through the body.
Context
Created as part of an ongoing visual inquiry into race, embodiment, and representation, the collage extends questions first explored in Marked: The Racialization of African Phenotypes and the Creation of an Embodied Archive. The work considers hair not merely as a marker of style or appearance, but as a site through which histories of belonging, resistance, beauty, and social meaning are continually negotiated.
Reflection
Hair has long functioned as a language within African and Afro-diasporic communities—a system through which identity, status, lineage, and cultural affiliation are communicated. In Hair No Evil I, the layering of textures and symbolic forms reflects my interest in the body as an archive capable of carrying memory across generations. The work invites viewers to consider how cultural knowledge persists through visual and embodied practices, even as meanings shift across time and place.
Witness and Archive (2023)
Overview
Witness and Archive is a digital collage that explores migration, memory, and Black embodiment through the visual language of abstraction. A fragmented figure moves within a layered waterscape, positioned against the atmospheric field of a Rothko painting, creating a dialogue between personal memory, collective history, and visual perception.
Context
Developed through the research and creative inquiry that would later inform Conversations with Rothko, the work investigates abstraction as a site of embodied knowledge. The collage considers how movement, displacement, and migration shape both individual experience and collective memory. The surrounding waterscape references the Black Atlantic as a space of transit, rupture, transformation, and cultural transmission.
Reflection
Witness and Archive reflects my ongoing interest in abstraction as a means of accessing histories that resist straightforward representation. The fragmented figure exists between presence and absence, visibility and obscurity, recalling the ways memory itself is often incomplete, layered, and continually reconstructed. Through the encounter between body, water, and abstraction, the work asks how cultural memory is carried, transformed, and reimagined across movement through space and time.
The title speaks to a central question within my practice: How do bodies bear witness to histories that exceed written records? Positioned between remembrance and becoming, the figure functions as both observer and repository—an embodied archive moving through the currents of memory, migration, and cultural inheritance.