IT WAS NEVER MY INTENTION:
NAVIGATING IDENTITY, MEMORY, AND SPACE THROUGH COLLAGE
Let’s be clear; I never intended to be an artist. But in that pursuit, I began emerging from the darkness that deepened after my mother’s passing in 2019. Her death reignited a spark, fueling my determination and adding purpose to my craft. It pushed me to finally pursue art professionally, whatever that meant. I returned to painting, shifting from pop culture renderings to deeper expressions of self. But as painting grew mechanical, I found refuge in the complexity of collage, sourcing and manipulating imagery with contrasting textures, colors, and forms. Blending opposing elements into one space, I embraced visual friction. Each piece became a delicate balance of harmony and discord, demanding thought and intention. I only wanted my work to expand the conversation on identity politics through materials and photography.
Photo by Francisco Ramos
Photo by Francisco Ramos
Blue like this has a way of lingering, paper collage, 2025, 40 x 36in... This piece uses the color blue to explore memory, melancholy, and resistance. It leans on the emotional weight blue carries across time, anchoring the personal within the political. Azulejos—decorative colonial tiles—appear throughout from my previous travels to Portugal, nodding to beauty’s entanglement with control and oppression. By repositioning these elements in new contexts, I aim to decolonize the gaze, giving Black women space to breathe. The work interrogates who gets access to aesthetic intimacy and why, echoing bell hooks’ assertion that true self-actualization means reclaiming how one is seen. Blue becomes a metaphor for survival—graceful, haunted, and defiant.
Oh, Chile you can find me in the folds until Monday, paper collage, 2024, 42.5 x 37 in... This piece reimagines memory and time through the fluidity of fabric, softening the rigid structures that often dominate my compositions. The folds of cloth obscure identity while inviting intimacy, making the body both visible and unknowable. Fabric, historically rooted in African and African American traditions, becomes a storytelling tool—one echoed in the works of Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach, Bisa Butler’s quilted portraits, and Alia Ali’s Borderland series. I photograph textures rather than using physical materials, flattening tactility into illusion and encouraging the viewer to see cloth as memory rather than matter. This piece represents a shift—materially and conceptually—suggesting that identity is not fixed, but shaped by the spaces it occupies.
What they don’t see is ours to keep, 31.25 x 39in, paper collage, 2025... This work unfolds like a conversation between concealment and visibility. Hidden figures suggest survival tactics and quiet refusals to be consumed by external expectation. Centered is the body of Nina Simone, whose voice in Four Women (1966) offered nuanced archetypes of Black femininity—later echoed in Jay-Z’s The Story of O.J.. That act of sampling becomes a visual metaphor here. Draped layers, muted bodies, and historical references converge to challenge the limits of representation. Audre Lorde reminds us, “Caring for myself… is political warfare.” This piece embodies that sentiment: to be unseen is not erasure—it is reclamation.
The story of Ausha, 42.5 x 37 in, paper collage, 2024... The Story of Ausha documents the layered exhaustion of Black womanhood. It chronicles the tension between composure and collapse, presence and invisibility. Ausha is not a symbol—she is someone. Inspired by Deana Lawson’s sacred domesticity and Nona Faustine’s confrontational self-portraiture, the piece uses fabric as both comfort and armor. A second, veiled figure lies nearby—perhaps another self in retreat, suggesting duality and refuge. The softness of the drapery contrasts the emotional weight, creating a visual echo of survival. This is not an ode to beauty, but to being—raw, real, and resilient.
I wanted to faint when that weasel sent a text, 22x25.5, paper collage, 2025... This piece uses humor and tension to frame a moment of interruption—emotional, visual, and spatial. The seated figure, bold and unapologetic in her nudity, challenges the viewer’s expectations and confronts the gaze with confidence. Surrounding her are layered interior textures—curtains, carpet, paneling, and a turntable—that signal cultural memory and Black domesticity. These elements function as markers of autotopography, mapping identity through material things. The silhouette tucked into the background becomes a ghost or guardian—a reminder of legacy, self-reflection, and the people we perform for or in spite of. The composition is a reclamation: of body, space, and narrative control. The title adds levity but also signals rupture, capturing a familiar moment of emotional recoil that’s as personal as it is universal.
The story of Ausha: Letters to a room i never left, 2025, 54.75 x 30.75in, paper collage, 2025... Inspired by Carrie Mae Weems’ The Kitchen Table Series, this work fractures time, showing four iterations of Ausha as non-linear embodiments of self. Scattered books and stitched surfaces evoke longing, self-reflection, and healing. These domestic settings explore identity as fluid and cyclical, stitched together by memory and place. Fragmented yet familiar, the objects in the room hold symbolic weight—each a piece of Ausha’s story. Like the shifting roles Black women navigate, this piece illustrates the quiet evolution of selfhood in constrained space, pushing against invisibility with every thread.
Well, it floats doesn’t it? , paper collage, 2025, 66.5 x 44.25in... This work reclaims the reclining female pose—a historical site of objectification—through humor and resistance. Referencing Manet’s Olympia, but subverting its hierarchy, the figure here is adorned with a duck float, an absurd yet powerful accessory. It pokes fun at the historical mockery of Black bodies, nodding to Sara Baartman and the ongoing commodification of Black femininity. The subject is not passive; she owns the gaze, floats above it. This piece asks: who gets to rest? Who gets to play? And who decides what leisure looks like when history has so often denied it?
Venus must be in retrograde, 40 x 67in, paper collage, 2025... Drawing from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, this piece centers Ausha as a divine figure emerging not from mythology, but lived experience. The waters here are murky, weighted with meaning, and the title—a phrase from pop culture—suggests emotional turbulence. It’s about disorientation and rebirth, about subverting the Eurocentric ideals that dominate art history. Like Well, It Floats…, this piece confronts the gaze and reclaims visibility, beauty, and presence for the Black female form. By situating Ausha within classical iconography, I rewrite the narrative—one where Blackness is not othered but exalted.
Are we there yet?, 74.5 x 42 in, vinyl adaptation on plywood, 2023... This piece uses transitive space, spaces of movement, transition, and impermanence, to explore identity as something constantly shifting. Found materials and recycled paper form the core structure, reflecting how identity is built from fragments of personal history, environment, and inherited narratives. The work’s layered construction mirrors how we move through different spaces, adapting and negotiating who we are based on context. An adaptation of the piece also incorporated repurposed plywood, reinforcing my commitment to sustainability by extending the life of discarded materials. This process is not just environmentally conscious, but conceptually vital, transforming materials mirrors how identity itself is formed through experiences, memories, and the spaces we occupy. By physically layering the work with reused elements, it preserves both the physical material and the underlying narrative, allowing these transient, often overlooked spaces to hold and shape stories of belonging and identity.
Don’t lean against the glass 002, 53 x 39.25in, paper collage, 2023... A counterpart to 001, this piece features my daughter and continues the investigation of movement, isolation, and identity. Set against the cold familiarity of the subway, the portrait is quiet yet defiant. The signage, Do not lean on door, becomes metaphorical, warning against vulnerability in spaces that feel neither here nor there. The subway serves as a metaphor for the in-betweenness of Black girlhood, growing in a world that surveils, defines, and often distorts. Like Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in the Invisible Man, she exists in motion, in negotiation, always between. This work isolates a singular figure not to simplify, but to honor the complexity within the stillness.
No church in the wild, 51.5 x 59.5in, paper collage, 2023... This collage centers the now-defunct KCOH building, once home to one of Houston’s most influential Black-owned radio stations. KCOH was more than a media outlet—it was a communal archive, a voice for the city’s Black population when few others would listen. The figures in the composition were captured spontaneously, walking “in the wild,” unknowingly becoming part of a layered dialogue on history, legacy, and erasure. Inspired in part by Jay-Z and Kanye West’s song of the same name, the title becomes a double entendre: there is no sanctuary when preservation fails. The pastel sky and geometric disruptions contrast the rawness of the sidewalk, echoing how gentrification softens destruction with aesthetics. This piece is both an homage and a warning.