PERFORMANCE
My live painting performances transform the act of creating into a public experience, where painting, movement, music, memory, and emotion unfold together in real time. Each performance responds to a particular human, social, or historical condition, allowing the canvas to become both witness and record of what is felt in the moment. Through scale, physical endurance, and improvisation, I use the body and the brush to confront difficult truths, honor the beauty and resilience of humanity, and search for connection, healing, and the possibility of something beyond what divides or wounds us.
WALKING ON AIR
Live Painting
April 20, 2021 - Hennepin County Government Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
%20(5).jpg)
Walking on Air at its inception, Hennepin County Government Center, Minneapolis, April 20, 2021.
On April 20, 2021, I set up my easel outside the Hennepin County Government Center to bear witness through paint as Minneapolis, the nation, and much of the world awaited the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin. I began Walking on Air without knowing what the day would bring, carrying the grief, anger, and uncertainty that had followed George Floyd’s murder and the uprising that reshaped the city. As the guilty verdicts were announced, the emotional atmosphere shifted, and the painting shifted with it. What began as an act of witnessing became a real-time record of release, hope, and a moment when justice, however incomplete, felt possible.
HEAVEN OR HELL
Live Painting Performance
2021 - The Cowles Center for Dance & the Performing Arts - Minneapolis, MN - Duration 57:20 minutes
Photo: Rich Peterson
Heaven or Hell was a live painting performance rooted in the energy, grief, anger, uncertainty, and collective rupture I witnessed while walking the streets of Minneapolis on the evening George Floyd was murdered and throughout the uprising that followed. Those experiences stayed with me when, on April 20, 2021, I stood outside the Hennepin County Government Center creating Walking on Air as the world awaited the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial. When MSNBC’s Ali Velshi asked what the painting would become, I answered, “heaven or hell,” depending on the outcome. This performance compresses those days of unrest, mourning, fear, hope, and eventual release into sixty minutes, carrying the emotional arc from the streets of Minneapolis to the moment a measure of justice finally arrived.
Photo: Rich Peterson
For The Love of Us
Live Painting Performance
2021 - Minneapolis North High School- Minneapolis, MN - Duration 67 minutes
.jpg)
Photo: Tamika Garscia
For the Love of Us confronted gun violence and the ways violence fractures families, neighborhoods, and communities. Created through live painting, the performance moveed between grief, urgency, memory, and love, asking what it means to protect one another and what remains possible when a community refuses to surrender its humanity
.jpg)
Photo: Tamika Garscia
Photo: Tamika Garscia
The Darkness in My Skin
Live Painting Performance
2022 - Historic Mounds Theater - St. Paul, MN - Duration 90 minutes
%20(1).jpeg)
The Darkness in My Skin confronts the persistence of racism in America by placing the Black body, memory, history, and contemporary violence within the same physical space. Through suspended painted figures, projected imagery, live painting, and my own body in performance, the work draws a line between the racial terror of the past and the forms in which that terror continues to reverberate in the present.
.jpeg)
The Darkness in My Skin confronts the persistence of racism in America by placing the Black body, memory, history, and contemporary violence within the same physical space. Through suspended painted figures, projected imagery, live painting, and my own body in performance, the work draws a line between the racial terror of the past and the forms in which that terror continues to reverberate in the present.
.jpeg)