My Family Anti – Autobiography

Text, narrative, and image are rooted in our individual and intrinsic cultural realities.  Reading is my safe place to attempt to learn about another person’s deepest thoughts and creativity. Reading is a place where the author’s mind and my own mind merge to create vivid stories in color, but also a place where we can become indoctrinated with cultural ideologies, where history can be shaded by non-truths and hypocrisy. My work seeks to break down narratives, taking apart disorienting dialogue in books and looking more closely at images from history. I tell my own story through the lens of a new author. I seek to break down the conventional thought around difficult stories. My own familial history, art history, and conventional history are the source materials I use to contemplate a trajectory forward. Part of my family were Southern enslavers, which inspired My Family Anti-Autobiography. I connected with Paula Whatley Matabane, a blood relative and the descendant of a slave woman and a white man in my family, and was given permission to use our family photos to try to create a new, inclusive family. The other half of my family descended from Ukrainian immigrants. I continue trying to break down conventional thought around difficult stories and discuss the complexities of being an American.