From the Deep: Why I Am Both Afraid and Still Creating

I will be partnering with The Denver Art Museum in January 2026 for “UNTITLED.” There will be Blackness.

I am having an extremely hard time as a Black human being on this planet earth. Every day it feels like the world reminds me that melanin is somehow a crime. I see it in politics, I hear it in the whispers around my art, I feel it in the silence when I dare to speak of pride, ancestry, or resistance. Our president—an openly racist felon—is rewarded with microphones, while the rest of us are asked to shrink. To some, Black politics is only ever “street politics.” Our art is always expected to be narrow, a monolith. But we are so much more than that.

On an intimate note, my art has suffered. Once, I photographed myself in elaborate costumes that pulsed with Afro-futurism, worlds where Blackness could time-travel, shape-shift, and thrive. Lately, those images feel outdated, siloed, dismissed. Every attempt to lift heritage into pride feels flattened by a culture that calls it “anti-American.” I feel disturbed, unmotivated, and—if I am honest—scared for my life.

And yet, then comes Ayana V. Jackson’s From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

Jackson dives into the myth imagined by Detroit techno pioneers Drexciya: that the children of pregnant women thrown or who jumped overboard during the Middle Passage survived under the sea, building their own civilizations. Her work—photography, video, costume, sound, even scent—creates an underwater world where grief becomes a portal and beauty becomes a weapon. She reclaims archives that once dehumanized us and re-fashions them into mythic landscapes that breathe.

This work reminds me: Afro-futurism is not outdated. It is ongoing. It is necessary. It is not just costumes or aesthetics—it is survival strategy. It is myth as medicine. Jackson shows us that horror and beauty coexist, that the ancestors we lost are also the ones who teach us how to imagine differently. She proves that Black art is not a side note or a stereotype; it is sacred world-building, alive with memory and longing.

I realize now that what I once thought of as “outdated” in my own practice may only have been waiting for me to return with new eyes. Heritage is not a weight. It is the wing I forgot I had.

So what do I do with all of this fear, all of this rage, all of this dismissal? I create anyway. I make in defiance. I photograph, stitch, and write as if the future depends on it—because it does. They call it “anti-American” because it refuses to whitewash our past, because it dares to imagine a different America than the one built on forgetting. But I know better. Our art is America. Our visions are America. Our survival is America.

To every other artist who feels the same despair, the same exhaustion: you are not alone. We are greater than their caricatures. We are not a monolith. Baltimore has a Black mayor. Maryland has the only Black governor in the country. And in every neighborhood, every studio, every archive, every underwater dream—we are still here.

I don’t know if tomorrow will be safer. But I know this: art matters. Representation matters. And no matter how much they try to silence us, we will keep imagining, keep myth-making, keep building the worlds we deserve.