About Homestead:

Homestead began as an experiment in college as I studied the abstract expressionism movement and explored how they used the basic elements and principles to submerge the audience into a visual feast of color, lines and shape. Being from the midwest, there is an abundance of green, open landscapes that are incredibly hard to miss when traveling outside of any major city. That being said, there is a staunch difference between being within the midwest and traveling above it. There are hundreds of lines and boundaries that criss and cross all over the farms I would fly over as I left Kansas City. These vast open farmlands dotted with farmhouses or “homesteads” is where I got my initial inspiration for my series. The organization of the lands and how the lines intersected, connected and created various shapes and zones inspired me to begin taking pictures. As I reflected on the images I thought about how many people could have possibly passed through there in the time that it took to grow it. I began to think about the rich, violent history of the United States and what farmland has come to represent. Historically, Missouri was a slave state, so any number of the lands we fly over could have been home to dozens or hundreds of slaves at any point in our past. This drew me to the idea of the Great Migration, and how all of America was affected by the end of slavery. As the reach of the  African American Diaspora stretched beyond the bounds of the south, their influence was felt all around the globe. It was my idea to take this rich history and use color to abstract it in a way that mirrored how much more colorful and beautiful the American landscape became following 1865.  Although there were and still are many challenges, America became a much more interesting place when the great minds of our ancestors weren't being silenced by chains and whips. There are drips, lines and shapes all throughout each composition that represents blood, regions of land and the movement of black people across the continent. The borders of the primary bodies represent the world that is yet to be explored as well as the trials ahead that face us in the future.

Although Homestead is centered on the hardships of African Americans, any number of people who have faced a struggle can relate to our story. In America, no one person is untouched by the hands of our ancestors no matter where they came from.