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Some examples include the Chief Buffalo Memorial project, which I’ll talk about a little later in this interview, and my traveling exhibitions Rights of the Child and Waiting for Beds. In the latter examples, I’ve done a lot of research and disseminated data into key points, which I then turn into artfully designed posters. The posters are displayed between artwork (generally paintings or mixed media pieces), which is installed in a wide range of spaces and paired with community programming. The posters offer a base level education on the topics explored in the exhibits, and give audiences the tools to have meaningful and critical conversations about said topics.

Rights of the Child focuses on global childhood norms as well as human rights treaties that the United States hasn’t ratified, and the overall justification of controversial policies for the sake of “future generations”. The exhibit is usually installed in conjunction with work by youth, because often children’s rights are a subject that gets discussed without the presence of youth voices. My goal is to connect audiences to global concepts and help them apply them to the local community issues they face.

In Waiting for Beds, my focus is on highlighting the absurd normalization of “waiting” for crisis care beds to open up. “Waiting for a bed” is a phrase used in multiple fields, from domestic violence, to homelessness, to addiction care, to mental wellbeing and hospitalization. Many people who wait for a bed die while waiting. The exhibit is meant to pair data with lived experiences, and the exhibition itself contains sections for community submissions, where people can submit objects or artwork tied to their experiences being institutionalized or caring for people in these settings. My hope is to create an exhibition that’s impossible to look away from—to create a space where it’s impossible not to feel compelled to change the systems under which we all live.

The common thread in my work is community engagement, making sure there’s space for people to insert themselves and share perspectives on the broader topics at hand in each exhibit or artwork.

You describe “My medium is people and space.” I’m curious how these two “materials” are at the heart of your practice?

They’re rooted in how I define art. If I had to define art in this moment, it would be “human ways of being”, with an emphasis on the action “being” and an implied noun of “people” within an implied setting of “space”.

This definition emerged partly because I don’t have a formal arts education. I’m self-taught, to the extent that I have many sources of inspiration and education that I pursued on my own time. Stylistically, I feel my use of color and my use of space stand out most as an artist. I’m drawn to surrealism as a means of layering different times and places into single imagery. In college I majored in Communicating Arts, but I focused on the theory side of communication more than my peers did. I have a fascination with architecture and the built worlds around us. I was really into Marshall McLuhan and his laws of media, “media is the message” type stuff.

The study of Media Ecology in particular really influenced how I think about art. I believe that the media used and organization of space is what makes meaningful art, it’s not always the subject matter of the work itself. What does work exhibited in a coffee shop communicate vs. the same work being hung in a high-end gallery in New York? How do we assign value to art? And what does it mean that “art” itself is a word that doesn’t exist in many languages around the world? These are some of the questions I started to reflect on as I began pursuing a career in this field.

The deeper into my career I’ve gotten, the harder it’s been to align myself with a single type of artistry; what do you call an artist who creates not just paintings, but films, murals, installations, writing, graphic design, etc.? I think for me, I had to ta