Artist Statement:

Braced is a group of small-scale drawings of young children holding one another in ambiguous embrace.  These intimate ink and watercolor line drawings show moments when young children grapple or hug. Each drawing raises questions regarding the nature of the participants’ relationship.  Is it combative or loving? The synchronous clasp of bodies stands as a metaphor for the much larger issues of racial tension and divide in the United States. For me, drawing is a form of rumination, or meditation and it’s the method I use to begin to talk about and understand difficult matters of race.  It is also an absurd notion that one or multiple drawings can give total shape to this complex topic.

Race is a significant social category for almost all humans.  In the United States, our specific history, and the way that we have or have not dealt with it makes it even more complicated.  Obviously, the environment that we create as a society has so much influence over the way children begin to perceive and attach meaning to race. I taught pre-school children for 6 years and this experience informed my decision to make this kind of work. These drawings are idealized imaginings of interconnectivity between children of different races, but they also comment on the difficulty of reconciling complex social categories with their own experience.  The result is this group of drawings in which human relationships are more-than-strained – they’re knotted.