BIOGRAPHY

I came to scratchboard the way most people come to their truest calling. Through resistance.

I was introduced to the medium in college and hated it. Scratchboard creates through subtraction, not addition. The artist removes darkness rather than applying light. For a mind trained to build, to layer, to construct, it was genuinely uncomfortable. And that discomfort turned out to be exactly the point.

Years later, I returned to it precisely because of that. But when I began applying it to Black figurative work, something unexpected happened. I stopped resisting and started listening.

I found one mentor, the incomparable Diana Lee, who generously shared everything she knew about the medium. But in the Black art space, no one was using scratchboard to tell our stories and show our people. That absence became my direction.

Raised alongside the Ohio River, a historical line between oppression and liberty, and now grounded in Detroit, a city built on reinvention, I’ve always understood that geography carries meaning. Every place has a story running underneath it. Scratchboard taught me how to find it. You don’t add light in this medium, you reveal it. It was always there, buried under the black.

Then Flint happened.

I was already making art. But I wasn’t yet saying anything. The water crisis changed that. The fury I felt needed somewhere to go that was larger than conversation and more permanent than protest. I built my first large format scratchboard piece as a necessity. When it showed at Art Basel Miami Beach and appeared in Vogue for the first time, for the first time, I felt as if my voice was useful.

Standing in front of that piece I felt seen. Validated. Full. For the first time I understood the difference between having gifted hands and actually being an artist. The hands had been there. The voice was new.

I bought a sketchbook that very day in Miami and didn’t stop drawing. Every story I’d been holding. Every piece of social commentary I hadn’t known how to release. That sketchbook became the foundation of Scratching The Surface — a solo collection, a show, representation in Chicago, work installed at large scale in the New Orleans Superdome during Essence Fest, and a place in the permanent collection of the National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center.

Most recently, I was selected as one of 50 artists for the National Gallery of Art’s inaugural Open Call, tied to America’s 250th anniversary — creating a scratchboard video piece that reimagines Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen through the lens of a young Black girl whose story was never told.

For me, scratchboard is more than medium. It is an anchoring meditative practice that mirrors life itself: patient, rhythmic, deliberate. Each incision is both a technical and philosophical decision. Beauty coexisting with discomfort. History held in the same frame as joy.

The point is what the work keeps teaching me: everything is layered. Everything consists of tiny strokes and decisions, and they all matter. Your job is to carve carefully enough that the light has somewhere to shine.

Carving until the light finds its way out.