Given the escalation in dissent and recent turn of events around the world, I felt compelled (somewhat urgently) to quit procrastinating and resume my Mixed Blood Manifesto project. Using the pandemic slowdown and studio-securing woes as an excuse for not producing or at least sharing my thoughts and work has become untenable, so I plan to use what venues I do have at my disposal to get what’s rattling around in my head out into the world. If I don’t, I’m worried about where all that pent up energy will go!

Anyway. Where to start? I suppose first explaining a bit of where I see this project fitting into the current social climate, and why it’s relevant. If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you’re one of a small group of people familiar with my ongoing series of paintings that belong to a project called Mixed Blood Manifesto. At this point, I haven’t properly exhibited the work – largely due to waiting and hoping for an ideal setting to share it in. But the general idea is this: as a mixed-race child of adoption, I’ve always felt my perspective on social issues and identity politics occupied a grey area that overlapped and perhaps synthesized traditionally divisive ideas. In my adult life, I realized many of my closest friends not only shared these values but, in many cases, physically embodied them as mixed-race individuals themselves.

So, I started being a bit more intentional in our frequent dinner party discussions about the hot-button topics of the day, and eventually began some casual interviews that would inform a series of portraits. The hope was that, in eventually presenting the collected work in a setting free from the constant sparring of social media threads, there might be a greater capacity for people to sit with ideas that might challenge their own notions about what’s important, what divides us, and what can bring us together. I feel that we’re uniquely positioned, as those with feet in multiple worlds, to address some of these conflicts and, ideally, become a bridge to better understanding or resolution.

Now, more than ever, this feels critical. You may not agree with some of the ideas, but perhaps art in its various forms is one of the last ways left to us to have meaningful, less reactive dialogue about the mounting issues we face as a global society. I think some of the concepts touched on scale from the intimate and familial right up to the national and international level. At the end of the day, I think most of us want the same things. What’s become muddled is how we get there – we’ve been distracted and manipulated perhaps, into misdirecting our focus. My goal – for my own sanity really – is to try to rediscover a sense of clarity, and in a perfect world, have an impact on changing the way people see each other for the better.