I've Always Been an Artist

For years, I've told people that I began my artistic practice in 2017. That's when I started painting, so it seemed like a reasonable place to begin my artist biography. But the more I reflect on my life, the more I realize how much of my story that simple statement leaves out. I've always been an artist. Long before I had a studio, exhibited my paintings or thought seriously about building a career in the arts, I was creating things. I was a storyteller, a poet, a musician, a designer, a maker and, as it turns out, a pretty resourceful entrepreneur. Creativity has never been something I occasionally pursued. It's been one of the few constants in my life.

I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, in a home affected by addiction. My childhood wasn't particularly easy. I was an overweight little Black girl with an expansive imagination, growing up in circumstances that often left me feeling misunderstood. I was sensitive, curious and constantly trying to make sense of a world that didn't always make much sense to me. I found refuge in music, particularly playing the flute, and in writing poetry, drawing and telling stories. I could imagine entire worlds beyond the one I occupied. Looking back, I recognize that creativity gave me something incredibly valuable. It gave me a place where I could be entirely myself, even when I wasn't quite sure who that person was yet.

One of my earliest memories of having my artwork recognized is also one of my most painful. At Lynch Wood Elementary, one of my drawings was selected to become a mural at the school. I find that remarkable now, considering that this was also the school where I was called the N-word every single day. I remember crying to my teacher, Mrs. Gentle, because I couldn't understand why the other children were so cruel to me. Her advice was that I needed to develop thicker skin and get used to it. I remember being completely bewildered by that response. Why should I have to get used to being treated that way? Why was it my responsibility to become less sensitive rather than someone else's responsibility to stop being cruel?

There is an irony in having your artwork celebrated by an institution that simultaneously fails to recognize your humanity. I didn't have the words to articulate that contradiction as a child, but I certainly understood how it felt. My imagination was worthy of being displayed on the walls, yet somehow I was expected to quietly endure the indignity of walking through those same hallways. I sometimes wonder what became of that mural. More importantly, I wonder how many other children have been told to toughen up when what they really needed was someone to stand up for them.

My early adulthood brought its own challenges. I became pregnant young and experienced a difficult marriage. Like many young women navigating complicated circumstances, I had responsibilities that didn't leave much room for figuring out who I wanted to become. There were children to raise, bills to pay and a life to build. I moved to Houston as a young adult, and that city changed me in ways I'm still discovering. Houston was where I grew tremendously in my professional life, but perhaps more importantly, it was where I began learning to be an individual rather than the person everyone else expected or needed me to be. I started developing my own ideas about what I wanted, what I believed and what kind of life I intended to create.

Through all of it, I kept making things.

For years, I was an avid scrapbooker. Not simply someone who enjoyed putting photographs into albums, but someone who designed and created elaborate custom scrapbooks for other people. I had a small business selling my creations on eBay and later Etsy. I made stationery, handcrafted gifts and all sorts of paper creations. I spent countless hours selecting materials, developing layouts, experimenting with colors and creating things that people would use to preserve their memories. I loved the process of turning a collection of photographs, paper and seemingly ordinary materials into something deeply personal.

It's funny to think about now because I never really considered those years part of my artistic career. Yet I was designing, creating, developing products, finding customers and selling my work long before I ever thought to call myself a professional artist. And I was doing something else that I now recognize as central to my creative practice. I was helping people preserve their stories.

My creativity wasn't limited to paper, either. Somewhere along the way, I discovered that I loved building furniture. With the exception of my living room couch, I've built every piece of furniture in my home. I've built furniture for friends, designed pieces to fit particular spaces and learned how to turn an idea into something functional and beautiful. When my daughter got her first apartment, I designed and built an entire living room for her out of pallets. I love that story because it captures something fundamental about the way my mind works. Give me an idea, some materials and a problem to solve, and I'll probably find a way to make something.

Writing has been another constant. I've now written three books and am working on a fourth. I think about that sometimes when people ask me how I manage to find time for so many different creative pursuits. The truth is that I've never experienced them as entirely separate interests. Writing, painting, woodworking, music and design all come from the same place. I enjoy imagining something that doesn't yet exist and figuring out how to bring it into the world. Sometimes that becomes a piece of furniture. Sometimes it's a poem, a book or a painting. Sometimes it's an elaborate scrapbook or a handcrafted card. The materials and methods change, but the creative impulse is the same.

In 2017, I began painting, and eventually that medium became the primary focus of my artistic practice. Painting offered me another way to explore the stories, questions and experiences that had accumulated over the course of my life. I began developing a visual language rooted in Black identity, ancestry, cultural memory and the complicated relationship between our individual experiences and collective histories. What started as another creative pursuit gradually became something much larger.

My series Nappy Roots emerged from that exploration. The figures in these paintings are often rendered in grayscale, with their hair becoming a place where ancestors, memories and generations exist together. I became interested in how much of our identity is inherited, how much is imposed upon us and how much we consciously choose to reclaim. As a Black woman who spent so much of her early life trying to understand why other people seemed determined to define her, those questions carry particular meaning.

In May 2026, I opened my solo exhibition, Nappy Roots: The Homecoming, at Alwun House in Phoenix. The exhibition brought together paintings, sculpture and installation work, including my seven-foot Remembering Tree. It was an extraordinary experience to see years of ideas occupying a space of their own and to watch other people engage with the stories I'd been exploring. My work has also led to exhibitions, an Artist Forward Fund award through Artlink, opportunities to work with arts organizations and the chance to share my creative practice with audiences I might never otherwise have encountered.

I'm proud of those accomplishments, but I'm increasingly aware that the exhibitions and accolades tell only a small part of the story. There is an entire creative life that preceded them, one that involved raising children, building a professional career, running small businesses, writing books, making furniture and finding ways to create even when life was demanding. None of those experiences exist outside my identity as an artist. They are part of it.

I'm now developing Exodus Doctrine: A Revolution of Joy, a new body of work that builds upon the visual language of Nappy Roots while exploring community, belonging and the ordinary beauty of Black life. I've been thinking a great deal about the parts of our history I want to reclaim and the parts I vehemently reject. I want to celebrate the communities we built, the traditions we preserved and the extraordinary ways we have cared for one another without romanticizing the circumstances that made so much of that resilience necessary.

I want to paint beauty shops, front porches, children playing, fathers loving their families, elders sharing stories and communities gathering simply because they enjoy being together. I want to explore what happens when we allow Black people to exist in our artwork beyond the familiar narratives of struggle and survival. Our history matters enormously, but so does our joy. So do our imaginations, our ambitions, our ordinary Tuesday afternoons and all the little moments that make a life worth living.

Perhaps that's why this new series has been so challenging. I know what I want to communicate, but I'm still discovering the visual language that will allow me to express it. I'm trying to make work that acknowledges the past without becoming trapped in it, that celebrates community without romanticizing hardship and that makes room for the fullness of our humanity. Some days I feel like I've figured it out. Other days I find myself staring at a canvas, wondering how to translate everything in my head into something that feels authentic.

Meanwhile, I'm still making things. I've been experimenting with greeting cards, returning to the paper crafting I enjoyed for so many years, exploring sculpture and 3D printing, and planning new woodworking projects. I'm still writing. I still love the smell of freshly cut wood, beautiful paper, a blank canvas and the possibility of turning something ordinary into something unexpected. I don't imagine I'll ever settle comfortably into a single medium, and I'm no longer particularly interested in trying.

Looking back over my life, what surprises me isn't how many different things I've created. It's how long it took me to recognize the common thread connecting them all. I spent years thinking of my creativity as a collection of hobbies, side businesses and occasional artistic pursuits. Painting was simply the first medium I approached with the intention of building a formal artistic career. But it certainly wasn't the beginning of my life as an artist.

I think about that little girl in Portland, the one who escaped into music and stories, whose drawing became a mural at a school where she was made to feel unwelcome. I think about the young mother who moved to Houston and slowly learned to define herself on her own terms. I think about the woman selling custom scrapbooks on eBay, building furniture for her family, writing books and finding creative possibilities in whatever materials she could get her hands on.

They are all the same person.

And I think there's something beautiful about finally recognizing that I don't have to separate those experiences into different versions of myself. The musician, the writer, the woodworker, the entrepreneur and the painter have always been connected. Creativity has accompanied me through some of the most difficult and rewarding chapters of my life. It has given me independence, purpose, joy and an enduring sense of possibility.

So perhaps it's time to stop saying I became an artist in 2017.

That's simply when I started painting.

I've been an artist my entire life.