I spent a little over ten years leading a kind of personal & collective creative network called The Young Never Sleep.
The studio and the people I’ve been able to connect with and create through it have shaped so much of who I am becoming.
Let this be a testament to the beauty of life, which we should all cherish with a deep gratitude for the Earth
The only home we’ve ever known.
Thanks to every single person who has made this world so wonderful for me.
Most of all, this is for you.
I’m constantly trying to find the best way to tell this story, to honor the many individuals who contributed to this journey.
Just like you, I’m continuously evolving.
Indian author and political activist Arundhati Roy
The roots of my fascination with other worlds began in childhood. Not only the worlds I imagined while alone in my room or with friends in backyards, game screens and playgrounds but the worlds that emerged within the inner dimensions of Black life.
Being a person has always been kinda weird.
How surreal is that?
(See: Blackness as Concept, Black History, Genders, Psychology, Sociology, Male Culture, The Economics of Juice & American Mythologies: The Construction of Black Identity)
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio on April 2nd, 1986 at I think about 4am?
Delivered by c-section at University Hospital. The rest, as I’m sure you can imagine... well, it’s a long story.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t have quite the sharpest memory. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to do too many things at once, or because I have too many passwords to keep up with, but it’s probably something simple like not getting enough sleep lol. Some of the memories that do stay with me though, are thsoe that come from my childhood. Specifically, those first few questions I asked, that seemed to stick with me through my adolescence on into adulthood. Why was the sky blue? How did we get here? What’s in space? Why weren’t there any dinosaurs in the Bible? It’s this deep rooted, inherent curiousity, instilled and nurtured in me through my childhood, by my mother, my teachers, relatives and peers alike, that has been the underlying theme of this practice since it’s inception in 2010. It’s also that childlike curiousty, the simple questions that lead to more tantilizing questions with every deeply nourishing answer, the fractal nature of why, from which the studio owes it’s namesake. The more I asked and explored colletively through the studio practice, the more I became enchanted by the ingenuity of humanity, and even more humbled and overwhelmed by the creativity of nature. In spite of legacies of oppression, disenfranchisement, systems of violence that through generations sought to encage me and those like me, it’s my love for understanding through science, art and nature that kept me grounded to my core self. Through natures reflections, and the peoople I have been so fortunate to create with, I saw an open window to infinite possibility, a vision of another world.
The roots of my fascination with other worlds began in childhood. Not only the worlds I imagined while alone in my room or with friends in backyards, game screens and playgrounds but the worlds that emerged within the inner dimensions of Black life. This foundation, set into motion eons ago through countless human and non-human ancestors, brought into being by my mother and father and nurtured through the years by countless family members, friends, peers, mentors and colleagues.
The phrase “Another World is Possible” is one I began using as an underlying philosophy of my creative practice, The Young Never Sleep.