As we travel through our lived experiences, we encounter what W.E.B. Du Bois referred to within his book The Souls of Black Folk as "Paideia," a concept that informs my art. A complex term, explicated by Dr. Cornell West in his book Living and Loving Out Loud,
"Paideia is an ancient Greek word that literally means 'education.' When we use it today, it means a deep education that connects you to profound issues in serious ways. It instructs us to turn our attention from the superficial to the substantial, from the frivolous to the serious. Paideia concerns the cultivation of the self, the ways you engage your own history, your own memories, your own mortality, your own sense of what it means to be alive as a critical, loving, aware human being."
(Cornel West, Living and Loving Out Loud, p. 22)
My name is Robin North, and I’m a visual artist whose work is informed by personal experiences, collective memory, theory, criticism, research, and the concept of Paideia. My practice utilizes multiple disciplines, including alternative processes, photography, digital media, collage, and mixed media within the creative process, to form compilations of art mediums that create unique effects, textures, and re-imagined narratives as means of expression and visual storytelling.
As a contemporary artist of African descent, I engage visual arts to reconceptualize, reinterpret, educate, and decolonize knowledge by challenging ideas and structures about race through a theoretical lens. I am particularly interested in the relationship between photography and history related to the African Diaspora and African Americans. I aim to engage in public discourse on culture, race, and socioeconomic inequalities, challenging historical assumptions and speculative narratives rooted in lived experiences.
As a 19th-century printer maker, the handmaking aspect of alternative photographic processes provides a personal artistic expression through creative thinking and the enjoyment of the unknown. The limitless possibilities within alternative process techniques allow unconventional artistic expressions that directly correlate with reimagining black representation and missing history. By imagining and reimagining visual interpretations, I aim for the viewers who are, themselves, moving through their own experiences in the search for paideia to work toward a clearer understanding of our reflections of culture, identity, and collective memory, which roots, and routes of the African diaspora and creolization have been etched through the legacy of slavery to make them visible through discussions and discourse.