A Tight 5

Statement of Purpose

I quit my second job for the year. After not getting paid, getting paid, being shorted, and no contract, I sent in grades for my students and told my department head that I would feel like an asshole if I were in his position. I’ve spent the last few days finishing this years PhD applications. This is my first year giving myself over to the process. I think maybe my only year. I feel a window of opportunity right now, that’s the only way I can really describe it. I’ve become increasingly shrewd about these things. I don’t lack any generosity with myself its just a feeling that as chaos, the planned kind, descends on so much, chaos, the unplanned kind, may bestow a little more grace on this aging head. I’m not that old, who knows though, at the end of this process I will be older, maybe not enough to be considered old yet, for sure older though. I’m in the middle of a lot of things right now. Unpacking it now seems like a good point of record. First my statement of purpose. This document is flexible enough for multiple institutions. It made me think about my artist statement and how I could update that to a longer version. It also made me want to run from academic life and get on with the thing, in the words of Gil Scott Heron, say fuck a job and money because I spend it all on unlined paper and cant get past. Getting past a smaller version than myself is a lot of these documents. In their bast sense they have teased out that larger form that I may fit inside of.

Statement of Purpose

My background in Art History comes from my work as an internationally exhibiting artist. Performance, postcolonial architecture, material culture, community action, spiritual practices, popular culture in media, representations of sexuality, and representations of race are some of the key elements in developing my practice. As a transdisciplinary artist, my research filters through drawing, image capture, audio recording, and codification to produce singular art objects, installations, videos, performances, and texts.

A persistent theme in my work concerns the propagation of images of black masculinity produced in America. Some questions that arise include: Where, what, and how are these images grounded? Is there a space for self fashioning out of stereotypical images of the black masculine? What is the nature of gender as a fluid conception of the self in this framework? What have the external pressures of faith, politics, economics done to mold representations of the black masculine? How has technology played a role in our formation of the imagery through which we recognize the black masculine?

Using the methodologies of critical self-reflection, comparative analysis, bibliographic research, and interviews with significant artists and theorists, I hope to give shape to an understanding of the black masculine made through performance, sexuality and materiality. My project has three main strands. Starting with paintings in popular culture— the painting of Clarence Thomas and other conservative operatives by Sharif Tarabay and Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama, I intend to examine how black masculinity in seats of power in American society has been imaged. Looking at the ubiquity of memes from 2000 to present specific to black masculinity, crying Jordan meme, 5 guys meme, and Steve Harvey Duality meme, I want to define the bounds of black masculinity in the way print and television media pioneered. Through an embedded journalism and biography of three pornographic actors and producers— Mickey Mod, King Noire, and Isiah Maxwell— I want to show how sexuality is performed and how the material of these performances extends beyond the field of pornography into culture at large. Finally, I plan to research contemporary artists—Pope L, Miles Greenberg, Carlos Martiel, and Jacolby Satterwhite—considering how their practices have subverted notions of the black masculine and expand our historical and philosophical understanding of the Black body..

My academic qualifications include a BA in Studio Art from Stanford University and an MFA in Studio Art from Southern Methodist University. Currently I am employed full-time teaching Art Appreciation at Tarrant County College. As a measure of the esteem with which my work as an artist is held by the North Texas community, my artwork is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas. Additionally, I am the co-founder of the transnational art collective, Empire of Dirt, which recently exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center December 2023 and in Mexico City during Mexico City Art Week, forthcoming 2025.

My interest to pursue a PhD is, in part, a necessary consequence of artists being increasingly called upon to justify their work historically and socially. Having the research credentials to effectively communicate and navigate these multiple platforms demands a rigor that can only come from the combination of structured education, discipline-based discourse with one’s peers, and self-directed research that is afforded by a PhD program. My overriding concern is with the current state of discourse on Black masculinity, and my potential to contribute significantly to that debate. My sense of the literature on representation of black masculinity is that it remains couched in supremacist leanings of colonial power, capitalism, and moral panic rather than a fully realized and dedicated scholarship. I am eager to pursue new foreign language skills, as both French and Spanish, are deeply entrenched in the colonial project of subjugation.

The potential of art, the way to affect people, frame crucial issues, and change individual lives is inspiring. It is not just a turn of phrase that the most nuanced of metaphors can have a lasting impact. I recognize that there is a gulf between such expressive means and the ability of historically marginalized voices to speak to these effects. While I recognize that the discipline of Art History is involved with understanding the various methodologies that comprise artistic practices, I am also mindful of the importance of context to this intellectual effort. Built into every artistic practice is an indissoluble relationship to its own time. As an educational goal, the study of art at the doctoral level strikes me as a new beginning to a life of communicating the meaning and significance of art in our world today.

Franz Fanon, Edouard Gilssant, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka work towards a representation of blackness that inhabits queer identity, the worker, the poet, and ways of creating images. Aria Dean, Fred Moten, Renee Green, and Mireille Miller-Young are some of my recent research considerations. I have found a lot of ground in medieval art and the discourse on materiality as a point of exploring the utility of artworks as a space for abstraction and conceptual thought. Much of this thought is attached to poetics as a means of understanding the manifold points between subjectivities. Dean’s Black Accelerationism, Moten’s Undercommons, Green’s work on cultural artifacts, and Miller-Young’s pornographication of academia converge with central themes of how we conceptualize society and its productions through an unstable network of often political, social, and technological identities. This is a big part of the methodology for how I locate my research from a space of leverage around capital, history, and means of production where culture and faith have ceded to a new order of accessibility. Recently, Dr. Lucy Weir’s, Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury is a text edging on what I would like to explore in my research.

I want to be a part of _____s PhD program to further this end. And it is a practice of questioning. Where I have been able to provide answers only ripples the surface of what I do as an artist and what art is in my practice.