When I was a truck driver in the US Army, convoying through the sand-dusted streets of Kuwait and Iraq, I loyally followed the prescribed standard operating procedures to complete the mission and stay alive in the process. Often, language and cultural barriers prevented the foreign soldier from communicating with the natives of the land. To circumvent this issue, we employed translators, who would convert our every word into the native language, making communication possible. My role today, as an Artist, is to be a translator.

I make work to understand and to be understood, as I think all Artists do. The problem every Artist must solve is, who am I hoping to make understand? Following the rituals and conventions of my mentors, contemporaries and peers, I was led to believe it was the dominant white society that I needed to inform, persuade and convince. In fact, that was and remains the “standard operating procedure” of the Black artist today; create art that decodes and explains the behaviors and cultures we know as plain old, everyday life. That path led me to a dead end, unable to understand my own work or who my audience was. So, I set out in a new direction.

I started at home. I interviewed my mother and my “May-May” and my dad and my Uncle Thomas. I sought out new neighbors and old neighbors. I curled and squatted family photobooks in and out of dusty shelves, in preparation for digital reproduction. I dove into Toni Morrison and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz for context. I expanded outward to other places, visiting historical societies and paying hundreds for Xeroxed photographs with poor resolutions. I studied history and scoured the web for the rarest of books and little magazines and used documents and found video footage and oral recordings and archived newspapers. I compared scholarship like Afro-Pessimism to Black Optimism and contrasted Critical Race Theory to Civil Rights and analyzed Black Power and Black Excellence and Black Feminism and Afro-Futurism. I agonized over hours of news reports and media depictions of Black Americans on screens and magazines. I swam through the Harlem Renaissance and glided with the Jazz Era and thugged it out through the Gangsta Rap era and bounced into the current Trap Era. And if there was enough energy left, I’d end the day with the pop culture television and cinema that turns my Black life into binge-worthy entertainment. I manipulate all this cultural existence and energy into noise, and then carefully translate the noise into tangible experiences in the form of collages, sculptural objects and video montages, and beds of audio. In its final formation, my work synthesizes into environmental installation, allowing my true audience to see themselves in spaces and places that matter to us. This “basic training” led me to a monumental observation.

Black people are the only ones who need to understand.