I grew up in rural South Carolina, where my only access to visual art and culture was fashion magazines and cable television. I had a fascination with process -- the process of deconstructing the language of imagery, which led to me buying many fashion magazines and looking at advertisements and editorials for hours on end.
I regularly tuned into MTV to record the music videos that most inspired me, and played them over and over again, until I could break the film down, frame by frame. Significant amounts of free time drove me to divide my visual universe into specific components, and I started to learn how the puzzle pieces fit together into coherent visual narratives. I began to engage with the way in which artists reconcile their outward expressions to themselves and the world.
In 2006, I entered Morehouse College as a Sociology major, with the initial intention of pursuing a career as a public policy analyst to solve the social problems of the world. Somehow the artist within me had lost his way en route between high school and college. But I remember the exhibit that brought the artist back -- it was the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2008 installation, "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe."
That summer before my junior year, I moved to New York. It was a time when the art world was suffering the brunt of the economic crisis, and for the whole summer Chelsea looked like a ghost town. Galleries were closing and appointment only signs began appearing on door after door.
At the time, there were 435 galleries in Chelsea's Art Gallery District. I made 500 copies of my resume and walked to every gallery in Chelsea until someone said yes. I ended up with three internships that summer, and learned information that continues to serve as source material for my vision moving forward. I took in the aesthetic value of the artist, art, fashion photography, design, architecture, and the urban landscape of New York City all at once, and learned even more so that every image and object is in dialogue with one another.
I would see Diane von Furstenberg's branding in the public sphere and a Paul Sietsema show at the Museum of Modern Art, and began to see more similarities in these two worlds -- commerce and art -- than differences. Both were essentially spaces in which image-makers or artists decided to frame their visions.
Since graduating from college, as I continue my journey through the art world, I look for venues, art and artists that are similarly experimental in the ways their aesthetics can be framed. There are many worlds and disciplines in dialogue with the art world, but at times they are not the spaces in which these dialogues can actively exist.
Finding the space in which my ambitions about this dialogue can be realized and cultivated continues to be the most significant challenge. But it is a challenge of learning my niche and ultimately understanding the unique contributions I can make to the art world.