Name/Title
Who Tends A GardenEntry/Object ID
2023.28.01Artwork Details
Medium
vintage collage, soil, Oil, acrylic paint on canvasContext
From the artist, email correspondence shared by Vielmetter Gallery October 15, 2025: "Who Tends A Garden? I’m thinking about how my connection to my ancestors and the generational heirlooms, in the form of stories and memories, are gifted to me. This wealth of knowledge is held close and dear within a “laundry basket” containing images of my direct ancestors (my paternal grandparents, my great grandparents who I was very close to and more distant ancestors I am fortunate to have photographs of) as fabric needing sorted and tended with care. Other collage elements within the fabric of figure are collected from vintage books from the late 1960s and 1970s that existed in our family library growing up which I have sourced multiple copies of over 15 years. These recreated psychedelic landscapes are familial gardens acting as fractured personal memories. The figure is an avatar, of both me and my male ancestors who I see genetically in my physical features that, piece by piece, have been collected to form my body. Behind the figure I applied soil from the farm I grew up on as a way of directly handling the ground which witnessed not just the ancient past, but also the experiences that ultimately shaped my identity. The figures arm and hand symbolize discovery, claiming territory, and a sense of direction and command, a visual trope used in 16th and 17th century illustrations of colonial explorers and conquistadors in the Americas. It was used in both historical and modern art to communicate concepts of ambition, destiny, and the power dynamic of colonial expansion. I’ve chosen to reclaim this imagery, traversing its meaning as an expression of direction, action, purpose and the reclaiming of space for Black Americans today. Baselitz’s fragmented paintings from 1966-1969 inspired me to adopt this composition as a tool to express how life events are shattered across generational storytelling and are reformed into heroic fables. These fables directly form our expressed identities today. Thick applications of oil paint wash around and over the soil creating dappled light and flowers. This allows me the opportunity to express and retell family stories, through the movement of paint, that are at least 9 generations old and contextualize my position within American History then and now."