07.20.2026
When I’m in my studio working, I’m constantly thinking and processing and asking myself questions. Very existential but not a crisis type of situation. I’m Capricorn, after all.
On my mind recently:
What happens when an artist stops measuring their life by external validation and starts measuring it by aliveness?
What deserves my attention?
What does devotion look like?
How do I measure time?
I’ve been reading a little about the philosophy of hedonism lately, but thinking about it more in the sense of staying with what feels good. These are such interesting concepts to me because they challenge the way we measure time as a modern society: productivity, milestones, deadlines, achievement. I’ve been thinking about another measurement system: attention + pleasure.
I’m currently working on a piece that requires a million little steps to get to the final form and I don’t even know if it will work out. And I think there’s something beautiful about committing to a process before you know it will succeed. This is the entire logic my studio practice is based on.
Every step is a small act of faith.
With this new piece I’m creating, I don’t get the immediate feedback and satisfaction of seeing it come to life like my yarn paintings. I’m making decisions that only make sense through time and accumulation. I’m learning what it feels like to work on something when the value isn’t measured by how quickly it’s finished. And I'm also learning how to trust myself and my process in a different way through sustained attention.
Staying with what feels good doesn’t necessarily mean that every moment has to feel good. It could also mean the overall experience feels worth it, even though the individual moments are tedious. Pleasure isn’t the absence of boredom. Maybe it’s trusting that the boring parts are part of something bigger.
And maybe that’s another way of measuring time. Not by how quickly I finish something, but by how willingly I return to it.
xoxo
07.14.2026
It really felt like I was one of God’s favorites getting to experience three inspiring exhibitions in one day. A full day of running around the city experiencing art. A truly reasonable amount of looking at yarn and textiles.
The entire reason for planning this trip to San Francisco was to see Sheila Hicks at SFMOMA and honestly, this was the day I was most looking forward to. I’ve looked at pictures of her work for years, so finally standing in front of it felt different. There’s sort of a strange gap between seeing an image of an artwork you’ve admired in books and online and standing in front of the actual thing.
After SFMOMA, we walked across the street to YBCA for Diedrick Brackens’ exhibition, gather tender night. This ended up being one of my favorite exhibitions of the trip. The installation used the space in a way that made it feel immersive.
We took the Muni from Yerba Buena to Dogpatch where the Museum of Craft and Design is. I grew up visiting the Bay Area, but this was my first time using San Francisco’s public transit. I still don’t fully understand it. Thankfully, Austin was in charge of that.
Video Craft at the Museum of Craft and Design felt like an exhibition where multiple interests of mine collided. Textiles, ceramics, video, film, moving images, and early technology.
It made me consider materials, how I use them, and how I think about them in my own work. A lot of my hanging sculptural pieces come from questioning, what if I could reinterpret a hard structural form into something soft? What if structure could feel soft? What if softness could hold weight?
xoxo
07.12.2026
Looking at art in person is way cooler than looking at it on your phone (as I write this from my laptop while you read this from your phone).
Day two of our Bay trip was spent at the de Young Museum, skipping through the sculpture garden on an overcast Friday morning in June. That’s summer in San Francisco. Wandering through James Turrell’s Three Gems, taking in Monet and Venice, lingering in the contemporary and abstract galleries with Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn. There’s something about standing in front of a work of art and experiencing it in person that a picture can’t replicate. Some works and feelings are impossible to capture through a phone or a video. Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s I Live in a Black Marble Palace with Black Panthers and White Doves #8 and Mike Henderson’s The Scream were a different kind of standing in front of a work of art experience.
This is something I think about with my own work. A picture can tell you what something looks like, but not what it feels like to stand in front of it. It can’t show scale, texture, and shadows, or the way light moves across it. There are some things that just can’t be translated through a screen.
Documenting and writing about this trip, and starting this studio diary, is making me realize things I already know. Intellectually, I already knew that seeing art in person was different, but then I actually stood there and felt the difference. Now I’m realizing how much I’ve been experiencing the world through a tiny rectangle in my hand. Maybe my phone isn’t lying to me but it definitely isn’t giving the whole picture.
xoxo
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