4MX Greenhouse
2018
4M Malcom X Greenhouse is an architectural and programmatic artwork built from an ideation of community holistic health. A greenhouse mimicking the shape of Malcolm X’s birth house built on his birth site’s foundation in Omaha, featuring spiritual/meditation programs, phytoremediation plant distribution and youth workshops focused on urban sustainability.
4MX Greenhouse is positioned at a high architectural vantage point overlooking seventeen acres of native grassland.
The Greenhouse project itself occurs across four related pillars of health, M1–M4.
M-1 is the self-identifier and reflects a legacy of self-empowerment and determination through architecture. M-2 cleanses soil and air via phytoremediation plants and EPA-lead soil remediation. M-3 is Meditation put into practice with Perennialism-based programing featuring a zendo and salah prayer space overlooking the grasslands. M-4, the foundation, is medicinal food supply. This is the farm to table identity of the greenhouse edified by holistic health derived from vegetation grown on site. The EPA classifies the region a superfund site due to soil-borne industrial toxins including lead. Free phytoremediation plants from Ferns to Poplars will be available to residents wishing to leach toxins from their lands as well as direct EPA contacts for lead soil extraction around their homes, making it safe for self-reliant food production.
Food crops will be free at local businesses such as the Fair Deal grocery store and restaurant. Omaha’s Union for Contemporary Art, the Omaha Economic Development Corporation, and the Malcolm X Foundation of Omaha have already pledged ongoing support including a part-time gardener.4Mgives tools to empower participants to build resilience into their communities through direct utilitarian actions. Offering North Omaha residents the health benefits of nature while working collaboratively to rehabilitate their immediate environments and develop self-sustaining practices leverages the historical legacy of the site as a seedbed of long term self-determination.
The Luminary, St. Louis
2020
In collaboration with civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders, The Luminary presents America’s Mythic Time, an exhibition focused on the devastating impacts of racial profiling, police brutality, and mass incarceration on the poor and communities of color, as well as forms of resistance and liberation both through the legal system and within community organizing and artists’ efforts. The exhibition particularly explores carceral capitalism as seen in the steady expansion of for-profit prisons, cash bail, modern day debtors’ prisons, and workhouse jails with health-destroying conditions in St. Louis and nationwide. Referencing Hortense Spillers’s notion of “mythic time” - a seizing of both time and bodies that sanctions continued exclusion and violence - the exhibition presses the ways in which over-policing and incarceration devastate communities of color, but also poses that forms of liberation originate within these communities.
America’s Mythic Time, curated by James McAnally with Katherine Simóne Reynolds, brings together significant works from American Artist, Maria Gaspar, Kahlil Robert Irving, Jordan Weber, WORK/PLAY and ephemera from a range of St. Louis-based activists and organizers including Close the Workhouse and The Bail Project, among others. The exhibition will be extended through public programs developed by ArchCity Defenders, including Booked: A Reading Library on Racism in Policing, Courts and Jails, a screening of Wade Gardner's documentary film Marvin Booker Was Murdered on February 27th at 7pm, and a public Close the Workhouse session at the Deaconess Foundation on March 5th.
Founded in 2009, ArchCity Defenders has grown from a firm of three volunteer lawyers to a full fledged holistic legal advocacy organization with 26 staff. Since its founding, ArchCity has represented thousands of people in nearly every municipal court in the region, as well as filed broad civil rights lawsuits challenging underlying abuses like inhumane jail conditions, inadequate homeless shelter, cash bail, and modern day debtors’ prisons. This exhibition is meant to extend Arch City Defenders’ ongoing work, bringing together the work of artists, activists, organizers and legal advocates to create a resonant and urgent exhibition on one of our region and nation’s most dire crises.
kNOw Space (Inverted Panopticon)
2018
2-way mirror film, plexi, metal, phytoremediation plants
‘kNOw Space’ is a portable zendo that provides participants with empowering tools to build resilience into self and community while providing private safe spaces within oppressive constructs to reflect or decompress in natural settings. The project will transform a deer hunting “blind” or panopticon (prison guard tower) similar to Thomas Jefferson’s estate as seen on a nickel, into a transportable meditation space with two-way mirrors that will be placed in public park areas as well as inner-city community gardens. The project seeks to reverse this haunting imagery of the guard tower into a positive inverted meditation space. This gives the visitor the power to “reflect upon one’s community in order to act upon it” (Paulo Freire) while blocking the gaze of possible oppressive elements with 2-way mirrored film that will camouflage the space into its surroundings. This project has been extensively tested by exhibiting prototypes at Midwest museums, colleges and neighborhood associations to test programming, safety and flaws in design to correct unforeseen circumstances. The pilot location will be on 2 acres of community gardened land in my home city of Des Moines Iowa in the Spring of 2019.
Des Moines Art Center alternative entrance for 'Body Snatchers'
(2016)
Richard Meier Trap House
2015 Richard Meier trap house (replication of Des Moines Art Center architecture) built with local community members. Community lecture/discussion on the state of white voyeurism in relation to race in museum spaces.
Collaboration with Dread Scott in Kansas City commissioned by 50/50 gallery (2016)
Des Moines Art Center (2016)
Body Snatchers (rims,cop car, phytoremediation plants, turf)
American Dreamers Phase 2 was installed in 2014-15 after participating in Phase 1 of the Ferguson protests with the help of Crenshaw legend Ron Finely who sparked the international gorilla gardening movement. Here I installed a progressive community garden within a deconstructed Ferguson cop car with the earth I collected from Ferguson. Invasive species were planted in the front of the vehicle along with volatile cacti species and tomato plants. The back of the vehicle was filled with species of fruit trees that hadn't been given the chance to come into fruition before being planted in a destructive environment. Opening night allowed hundreds of viewers to reach into and around the car to grab tomatoes. The viewer could then actively choose to utilize the tomato as a source for nutrients or throw back at the vehicle in protest. The choice to engage with was key in this installation a success. I found that this participatory form of installation works much like the lecture and round-table discussions that followed which was much more conducive to progress.
Des Moines Art Center (2016)
Body Snatchers (rims,cop car, phytoremediation plants, turf)
Des Moines Art Center (2016)
Body Snatchers, performance (rims,cop car, phytoremediation plants, turf)
Souvenir (2016)
White Box NYC Gallery
Marble house facade made live during Trump's nomination speech by undocumented construction workers from Honduras and Mexico
Cherokee White Eagle, DONK (La Esquina Gallery, Kansas City)
In Cherokee White Eagle, DONK I’ve transformed the iconic Chevy El Camino into a temporary greenhouse that contains Cherokee White Eagle corn potted inside of orange Home Depot buckets. The branded buckets represent the narrative of black and Latino men desperately seeking work inside the corporation’s parking lots across the country. In this way I’ve linked back to the historic relationship black, brown, and Indigenous communities have with nature, land, and labor, which is recurrently erased by the dominant culture.
Final Phase, American Dreamers (grow light, chrome rims, taxidermy wolf, hyper accumulator plants, turf, police car)
On view at The Soap Factory, Minneapolis (Working Forces)
LV Trap House (2014)
