One of the great impacts of collaborative art is its ability to pull in people that may not traditionally see themselves as creative. Art and creating, which can be inaccessible, is suddenly within reach with collaborative and community-based art, and in a lot of circumstances, speaking a language that is more diverse and interesting than solo work. In my pieces, Self-Portrait and Portrait of My Favorite Smile, I worked collaboratively with my husband, creating digital drawings together. My husband showed me his favorite shapes to doodle and covered the background while I drew the portraits. These two pieces are experimental, tests almost, for a series of collaborative portraits, where individuals guide me through how they want to be represented, and participate in the art made from them.

This body of work is a visual record for the research into my family’s cultural heritage and genealogy. My works are most influenced by the Fulani (Fulɓe, Peul, Hilani, Fula, Pël, Fulaw), and Yoruba (Ìran Yorùbá) tribes because these are the groups my family are most likely to have connections to. My choice in media contributes to the body of work by highlighting my status as an outsider to these communities. I pair this research and knowledge with my own admiration for the complex cultures and customs I have no connection to, my relationship to Africa as an American, and with speculation into what my family and enslaved ancestors could have been had they never encountered the zeitgeist of European and American colonialism.