I have long admired Jean-Michel Basquiat.
When I recently read about his obsession with drawing human heads, how the skull became portal, how repetition became inquiry, I felt a quiet recognition. He wasn’t drawing likeness. He was excavating identity.
That resonates.
For much of my artistic life, I have returned to abstract self-portraiture as a way to understand my own mixed-race identity. Before the weaving, before the marine debris and sacred vessels, there were faces. Fragmented. Multiplied. Obscured.
The head was my terrain.
Inside it, I was always calculating.
Adjusting.
Disappearing and reappearing.
Mixed race.
Black woman.
Read before I could speak.
So I studied myself first.
Where to soften.
Where to sharpen.
Where to hide in plain sight.
Abstraction allowed me to map what it meant to code switch, those subtle recalibrations of voice, posture, softness, power. The masks were not theatrical; they were protective. Sometimes armor. Sometimes camouflage. Sometimes simply a way to hide in plain sight.
In those early works, faces fractured, eyes doubled, mouths silenced or amplified, I wasn’t trying to be obscure. I was trying to be honest. I was drawing the invisible labor of navigating racialized space.
The head became:
- A map of tension
- A container for ancestry
- A site of translation
- A sanctuary
Today my practice lives in fiber; knotting, wrapping, weaving memory into form. But when I look back at those early abstract self-portraits, I see the same impulse.
The masks became knots.
The layers became cordage.
The head became vessel.
Admiring Basquiat reminds me that returning to the same image again and again is not fixation, it is devotion. Returning to the head, again and again, is a way of saying: this is where my story lives.
And in that conversation, I continue to draw myself, fractured, layered, crowned, protected, learning that abstraction has always been my way home.
