07.07.2026
Hi! Hello! Welcome to my studio diary :)
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Partly to share more nuance and context around my practice and partly as an attempt to be on my phone less. When they say it’s that damn phone they are right. Sharing my thoughts and documenting my life on the internet is not something that’s new to me. My résumé of oversharing includes Xanga, Myspace, LiveJournal, DeadJournal, melodramatic.com, Flickr, Blogspot, Tumblr, and of course, Instagram. Instagram comes with its own level of performance with likes, engagement and people interacting with content that I find myself less interested in these days. This studio diary is just talking? writing? into the void, screaming into the abyss with a hypothetical audience. An unspoken “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me” agreement that feels familiar and comfortable, like the early internet days of AOL Instant Messenger, away messages, and dial-up.
We’ve been back from our 3 days in the Bay for a few weeks now. I love Northern California and spent a good amount of time in San Francisco and Marin County throughout my childhood to early twenties because that’s where my dad lived until he passed. This was the first time I’ve been intentional about visiting museums and looking at art while visiting.
Over three days we went to OMCA, the de Young Museum, SFMOMA, YBCA and the Museum of Craft and Design. The entire reason for planning this trip was to see Sheila Hicks’ exhibition at SFMOMA (more on that soon). While planning our itinerary and researching other exhibitions around the Bay before we left San Diego, Austin came across Mildred Howard’s Poetics of Memory at OMCA. Admittedly, neither of us was familiar with her work, but added it to our must see list.
Walking through her exhibition, I found myself unexpectedly emotional. It felt deeply personal on so many levels. What a gift to see a living Black artist in her eighties still making ambitious work and receiving her flowers! It was something I didn’t realize I needed to see. A true reminder to keep going.
As someone who started making art later in life, seeing an artist with decades of work behind them still making work reaffirmed my mindset. I’m building a lifetime practice, not chasing a moment. What I’ve been thinking about and the work I make is built through repetition, returning, and accumulation. Seeing that kind of longevity embodied in another artist’s life reminded me that those values extend beyond the work itself. I keep becoming myself again and again.
Longevity over virality.
xoxo