While co-curating the 2023 exhibition Beyond the Whitewash in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I worked alongside a remarkable group of Oklahoma-based artists and art workers. Over the course of a year, our multi-generational, racially diverse team gathered regularly to share decision-making, allocate resources, and reflect deeply on the project’s direction. What began as professional collaboration evolved into a community grounded in mutual care, accountability, and kindness.

Through this process, I was welcomed into cultural and spiritual spaces that are typically inaccessible to white people—spaces where the sacred is intimately woven into daily life rather than set apart from it. These encounters reshaped my understanding of belonging, healing, and presence. They awakened within me something I had long resisted: a belief in God. I have long recognized my spiritual bankruptcy. My cultural heritage is rooted in the concept of Manifest Destiny, which in the United States dates back to the first colonial contact between Europeans and Native Americans. This ideology includes a belief in the inherent superiority of white male North Americans. My ancestors, who were generational militiamen, large plantation owners, and enslavers, believed that God had destined them to conquer the territories of North America. Historical documents confirm their complicity in the extreme measures to clear Indigenous peoples from their land, including making policies and participating in the forced removal and violent extermination of Native tribes. Yet, the spiritual frameworks I encountered in Oklahoma prompted new questions about faith, ritual, and the possibility of the sacred in contemporary life.

After completing a three-year tenure with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, I relocated to Providence, Rhode Island, where I established a new studio and began working on Notes to Myself—an evolving body of work that explores a way to experience the world that will open me up to the transcendence that informs it, while also forming myself within it. 

Notes to Myself begins with a belief—tentative yet insistent—that there is something beneath all things: a timeless, invisible ground from which the visible world arises. Life emerges from that source into the field of time, where everything is divided—past and future, life and death, good and evil. I don’t seek to resolve these opposites but to hold space for them, to dwell with the mystery that carries horror and wonder, sorrow and joy. Eternity, as I am beginning to experience, is not elsewhere—it is here, in this present moment, in all things.

This work asks: What if suffering is not a mistake, but a spiritual condition of existence? What if the knowledge of good and evil—long viewed as a curse—was the beginning of our participation in life? To eat the fruit is to awaken to beauty, violence, fragility, and depth. It is a gift of consciousness.

And now, in the face of a deepening political collapse in the United States and the authoritarian consolidation of power, recognizing this consciousness is essential. US President Donald Trump has reignited the spirit of "Manifest Destiny" by emphasizing nationalism, Christianity, and territorial ambitions in his policy statements during his second term. We live in a time when democratic institutions are being deliberately unraveled: the erosion of checks and balances, the politicization of justice, the use of military power against civilians, the impoundment of funds, and the normalization of corruption for personal gain. These acts are not only unconstitutional but also devastating to individuals, communities, and institutions. In the face of democratic erosion and the authoritarian consolidation of power in the United States, I ask: What does it mean to live ethically, spiritually, and imaginatively alongside a world coming apart at both ends? What does it mean to see something intangible within the structures around us that are collapsing?

The series holds these contradictions. It names the horror and wonder as aspects of life that interface between what can be known and what is unknowable. The work responds to the political moment by turning toward the invisible forces that underlie life. The field of time is a place of opposites, but at the center, there are no divisions. The task is to see, to feel deeply, and to remain present to life as it is.

I refer to this ongoing body of hybrid works as constructs. The word carries layered meanings. On one level, it relates to physical construction—the acts of building, arranging, and layering that shape each piece. Materials are juxtaposed in ways that generate new, often unexpected relationships. On another level, the name gestures toward the conceptual: the social constructs—those invented categories and systems that define how we perceive reality. These constructs explore both the tangible and the intangible, mapping the interplay between external forms and internal knowing. Through this convergence, the work seeks to draw an undefinable inner source into outer expression, finding coherence not through resolution but by holding together fragments—an invitation toward wholeness amid fracture.