Beyond the Whitewash — 2023

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

Through this process, I was welcomed into cultural and spiritual spaces rarely accessible to white people—spaces where the sacred is woven into daily life rather than set apart. These encounters reshaped my understanding of belonging, healing, and presence. They awakened something I had long resisted: a belief in God.

My heritage is rooted in the ideology of Manifest Destiny—a worldview that justifies conquest and dispossession through claims of divine right. For my ancestors—militiamen, plantation owners, and enslavers—religion was expressed through the violent removal and extermination of Indigenous peoples and enslavement. I understood at an early age that I was spiritually bankrupt. Yet, the spiritual frameworks I later encountered in Oklahoma opened new questions about faith, ritual, and the possibility of the sacred in contemporary life.

What Remains — 2024–Ongoing

After completing a three-year tenure with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, I relocated to Providence, Rhode Island, and I began What Remains—an evolving body of work seeking ways to be open to transcendence while forming myself within it.

What Remains begins with a belief—tentative yet insistent—that beneath all things lies a timeless, invisible ground from which the visible world arises. Life emerges into the field of time, where all is divided: past and future, life and death, good and evil. I do not seek to resolve these opposites but to hold space for them—to dwell with the mystery that carries horror and wonder, sorrow and joy. What if the knowledge of good and evil was not a curse but a beginning, and with it, we become participants in our own lives? Heaven and hell are not places, but truths within us. Every experience is sacred—not because it is painless, but because it is consciousness.

Urgency in the Present Moment

The work asks: What does it mean to live ethically, spiritually, and imaginatively alongside a world coming apart? What if suffering is not a mistake, but a condition of existence? Today, amid the political collapse in the United States, when democratic institutions are being deliberately unraveled, these questions feel urgent. We are witnessing the erosion of checks and balances, the politicization of justice, and the normalization of corruption.

Constructs — The Language of the Work

The series holds these contradictions, naming horror and wonder as inseparable. I call these hybrid works constructs. The term refers both to the physical acts of building—layering, arranging, and juxtaposing materials—and to the social constructs that shape how we perceive reality. These works explore the tangible and intangible, mapping the interplay between external forms and internal knowing. Rather than seeking resolution, they hold together fragments—an invitation toward wholeness amid fracture.

Shelby Head

Shelby Head