Art is using the past to create the future. Art is culture, art is history, art is what we become.
About a year ago I scored quite the steal of wood slabs from a miller on Marketplace. Art making, especially with a relatively new medium, allows my mind to wander about craft, meaning, society, and politics and how it fit into it. Art is always in conversation with what came before it, and sometimes that past arrives in the form of locally sourced black walnut slabs. I feel history pressed into every line of grain. These boards carry years of weather and quiet endurance. Much like paper collage, taking a tree out of the context of the woods and bringing it into the studio becomes its own kind of excavation. I gather fragments of what once stood in the world and prepare them for transformation, listening to what the material already knows while guiding it toward what it might become.
Culture shifts the moment we choose to reshape what others overlook. As I cut into the slabs I feel that shift happening in real time. Because culture does not evolve in a vacuum, it stands as a fluctuating, shifting record of the people’s history. And art making is the visual legacy of culture. White supremacy, however, relies on a rigid and unchanging world where meaning is locked in place and only certain stories matter. Art disrupts that. Every cut, every pass of sandpaper, every decision to preserve the live edge becomes an act of moving culture forward and away from the narrow, fearful, and weak narrative that white supremacy depends on.
History fills the studio before any tool touches wood, paper, fabric or any note is played. The scent of lumber, glue, or glowing tubes fills the space the moment I step in. The resistance of the blade, and the slow process of smoothing rough surfaces into something utilitarian and useful all connect me to generations of makers who shaped their lives from what was available. But history also reminds me that art has always challenged those who want to freeze culture in their image. The conservatives that worship at the altar of tradition, the extremists fueled by blind rage, and the average aloof white supremacist with zero capacity for empathy all have long feared art because art refuses confinement. It questions, rearranges, exposes, reflects and reimagines the world. By taking discarded material and transforming it, I participate in a lineage of artists that insists the overlooked has worth and merit and value.
Art does not simply record who we have been. It imagines who we might become, even in the utilitarian objects we use every day. When I turn a rough slab into a serving tray or a shelf and watch the grain radiate under board butter and oil, I see what happens when we insist that transformation is possible. These objects become more than functional. They carry physical, spiritual, and emotional weight. They contain stories of renewal and access. They create room for new rituals, new gatherings, and new communities.
This is why existing as an artist is a form of resistance. Every piece I make is a quiet refusal to let the bastards get me down. Every song I write is a loud rejection of white supremacy and those that feel they define what is valuable or who is allowed to shape the future. A fallen tree becomes a useful object in someone’s home. A discarded slab becomes a surface that holds memories. These transformations echo the larger work of reshaping culture itself. Art becomes a bridge between past and future, a steady reminder that imagination and shared humanity will always rise against the forces that try to diminish and divide us. Beauty belongs to everyone, not just those who claim ownership over culture and dictate who belongs within it. Hate has no place here. Except towards authoritarian fascists. And nazis… fuck nazis.
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