Hospitality Design - November 2023 - 87

After earning your master's degree in divinity, you ended up
traveling to Tokyo to teach English and continue honing your
craft. You stayed there five years before moving to San Francisco
in the 1990s. What were your first impressions of the city?
The AIDS epidemic was still happening in full steam, but the culture
was much more present. There's the issue of having to deal with racism
within gay culture, but at 31, I was naïve to all of that because all I saw
was the gay life. Only as I got older did I see the nuance of gay Black
culture, and how dominant influences play into the subcultures. But
when I first got here, it was very different from Japan and very different
from where I grew up in North Carolina.
Bitten #3, part of O'Arwisters' new series of
sculptures that marries soft and sharp elements
How has your art evolved from where you started to the work
you're doing now?
The work is more congruent with my experience. My grandmother
and my mother were quilters. The women in my family used fabric to
express their worldview. I started making art out of repurposed fabric.
While I was [an artist in residence] at Recology San Francisco in 2016,
I decided to match my feelings and emotions with what was happening
in the world. There was an election, and I felt broken, thrown away,
sharp, dangerous, marginalized. I was in the recycling area at Recology
when I heard a crashing sound. It was all these broken plates and cups.
I was standing there looking at all this broken stuff, and I felt emotional.
I bring fabric to broken objects and weave them into beautiful objects,
accepting them as they are, not trying to fix them or throw them away,
but creating beauty out of materials that reference my internal feelings
and emotions.
The Bitten #4 sculpture laces together
implements of punishment and threat
Are you expressing generational trauma through your artwork?
The work is something that's beautiful, broken, and thrown away,
wrapped in fabric, not trying to repair it, just accepting it as it is-
acknowledging that even though it's broken, it's still beautiful and it can
be redeemed, not because it needs to be, but because it still has power
and presence. By extension, we're also broken at times. We may feel that
we're in the anxiety and stress associated with what's happening. The
political, social, economic, and environmental stress we are feeling is
detached, thrown away, marginalized, sharp, and dangerous. That's how
I felt and still feel as a Black queer male in the United States.
Why did you get involved with the 3.9 Art Collective?
Raising awareness of the diaspora of the Black population in San
Francisco is paramount. The economic and political situation in which
we find ourselves as Black people, we were being erased and ignored.
That to me was a travesty.
Bitten #8, made with ceramic, fabric,
zip ties, beads, and locks
Given everything that's happening around us, how can art be a
catalyst for change?
Artists are the ones who are able to speak about [the world] in ways
others [can't]. This is where I need to be. The more I'm able to attune
myself with what's happening around me, it will set the pace for other
people to be able to navigate a world that is becoming more and more
complex. As artists who have been marginalized, we're the first ones
to have our funds cut or the first ones to have our books burned or the
first ones to have our art removed from the museum. We are saying
something the world has always needed to hear. You may not like what
you hear, but we need to hear it, and this is the time to do it. I'm wellequipped
to be able to help people connect with their own emotions
and feelings in a positive way. We need to be able to speak to ideas and
emotions deeply enough to help each other. hd
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Hospitality Design - November 2023

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