I am a research-based conceptual artist whose practice investigates the historical narratives of the African Diaspora and Americans of African descent, with a focus on the intersections of photography, history, and systemic racism. My work documents and reinterprets the histories of Texas Freedom Colonies—autonomous Black settlements and communities that emerged after Emancipation during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. I treat descendant-governed archives collected from Freedom Colonies as both evidence and method, studying how photographs and related records shape public memory, place knowledge, and historical claims. Through this research, I build forms of archival stewardship that remain accountable to descendants and the land.
I developed the AI3 framework to guide both research and studio practice. Archival Intelligence aligns with darkroom work, film, and alternative processes as material ways of reading and remaking the archive. In dialogue with the Pictorialist movement, I reframe photography to prioritize cultural memory over scientific objectification, using 19th-century processes, alongside collage layering, to hold historical distance and descendant presence. Ancestral Intelligence aligns with post-documentary practice, oral history, and intergenerational collaboration as sources of interpretation and authority. Augmented Interrogation aligns with digital humanities and expanded image tools, including geolocated photography for mapping and retrieval, as well as 360-degree scans converted into 3D models of landscapes and burial grounds.
My artistic practice employs creative storytelling rooted in family archives, oral histories, and intergenerational collaboration to bring descendants and future family leaders back to ancestral communities, renewing a living connection to place. Within Freedom Colony sites, I position churches, schools, and cemeteries as cultural infrastructure and as spatial records of permanence, kin networks, and collective building. Guided by visual art, digital humanities, and participatory design, I translate archival materials and field documentation into artistic production and public-facing forms.
My fieldwork integrates digital tools with traditional processes to preserve spatial evidence. I use digital cameras with geolocation so that photographs retain embedded coordinates for mapping and retrieval, alongside 360-degree scans converted into 3D models of landscapes and burial grounds. I build these site-based records alongside family photographs and documents that seldom entered institutional archives, enabling the work to link place to ancestral knowledge. Using grounded theory, visual anthropology, and post-documentary methods, I shift the claim from “this is what happened” to “this is how meaning is made around what happened,” while centering descendant authority and participant dignity. The work is supported mainly by descendants, not outside institutions, which makes preservation urgent and makes community control central to the methodology.
I reimagine and recontextualize overlooked narratives through a human-centered approach that prioritizes ethical collaboration and community ownership. This work corrects a public record that often excluded these communities or reduced the post-Emancipation experience to sharecropping and debt peonage alone. In my research, Freedom Colonies emerge as intentional spaces of safety and self-governance rooted in mutual aid. Through land ownership and the creation of community infrastructure, these communities asserted autonomy and continuity, leaving a material record that supports descendant knowledge and long-term claims to place.
I examine how archives, images, and sites can produce accurate public histories and durable forms of community care. I document Freedom Colony places through oral histories and metadata, then translate those records into countermapping layers, StoryMaps, descendant-governed digital archives, exhibitions, and photobooks. Through this artistic production, I create dialogue across descendants and local publics about what has been omitted and what must be preserved. The result is a research trail that can be revisited, carried forward by descendants, and adapted by other Freedom Colonies to preserve their existence and enter the public record.