(melancholy music) - I think my medicine is art, my language is art.

I think the term artist means to be responsible for what's happening in the world, how you see it, how you record it, how you make things that are a result of what you are trying to say, whether it's a question you're answering, or a story you're trying to tell, or here's something I need to make because it's just embedded in me.

Like I have to make something.

Detroit is embedded in who I am.

I've been here all my life since the rebellion in 1967.

That's when I was born and so everything around me becomes a part of the story I'm trying to tell, or the question I'm trying to ask.

My superpower is being able to visually communicate how I feel about what's happening in the world.

Nina Simone says, "If you're going to be an artist, "it's your duty to reflect what's happening in the world."

And in the world that I live in, from the time I can remember remembering, there's always trauma, and hurt, and pain, and I'm not always talking about that, but you can't ignore it.

And on this day, I think about the lives that are lost, that are constant, like coming at me through different mediums, and so I'm thinking about homicides, and deaths of young people, and how I'm affected by it.

But I'm talking about death where people aren't considered people.

Like you don't matter.

You're not important, so I'm just gonna take your life.

I don't care how old you are, I don't care who you belong to, and when that person is missing from our communities, not just the blood family is affected.

We are all, or we should all be concerned.

You know, a life is a life, a human is a human.

And so in this work, I'm talking about that pain.

The name of the exhibition is, "Why You Wanna Fly Blackbird?"

And I got it from a Nina Simone song, who talks about black women, like how dare you try and be happy in your life.

How dare you not expect pain.

Pain is gonna come, you have to move through it and you have to live, but pain will be here.

I didn't want the colors to be so seductive that it draws you in as pretty.

Like I don't like the idea of my work being pretty.

I want it to be impactful, I want it to be deeper than just what you see, and I wanted it to be large enough to have some girth to it.

So these particular pieces are very large drawings.

They're also reliquaries, if you will.

So they talk about, like the body, the housing of the bodies that we have, like the home and then what it's like to have a nest with no eggs in it.

Thinking about the empty nest of children who never return.

You know I don't care how old they are, they never can return, so I'm just talking about the darkness in that and expressing it with the most eloquence that I can.

The cages will represent empty homes that can be the home that they lived in, that can be the community that they lived in.

How do you deal with that, you know that room that's empty?

And so when we lose these people that are not treated with a value out of our communities, how do you deal with that?

So Levan is helping me on the dresses, 'cause I want to make dresses that will hang from the ceiling, just above the patrons' heads, but the birdcages will be the empty wombs underneath the dresses.

And so I'm asking him to help me figure out how I'm gonna make the dresses, which are made out of Japanese rice paper, so that they can be sheer enough that the bird cages can go underneath them and the patrons can see them with the lighting and hopefully they have the impact that's in my head and in my heart.

I want people to pay attention to it and to be more empathetic with others' lives.

If you see something happening and you can do something about it, why wouldn't you?

And so when I look at the homicide rates across the country, they're incredibly high for African American, indigenous, and also Latin American children.

And so if this is all I can say and do about it, I want someone to know that I care, even though they're not my children, I care that they're missing, that they're gone.

That there's somebody should think about doing something about it.

The motion of movement when I'm making these things, like when I did the nest here, you know the motion of drawing, and drawing, and drawing.

You know that obsession of movement and what it feels like to do that.

These movements that we do over and over become very much ritual.

Maybe these are all prayers visually to say I'm sorry that your life is gone, but I wanna say that you meant something, that you were important.

Every artist wants someone to look at their work for a long time and I didn't want to make it so obvious and obtruse where it's like, you know you see people getting killed, but I think the work and the drawings and some of the paintings that I'm using can be seductive, so I want people to make sure that they walk away with knowing that I'm in a world, I am affected by it, and don't just listen to the news and be in the world, and not really take part in what's happening.

Think about what your voice is and what your superpower is, and see what you can do to help.

I wanna say something that's important, and I wanna leave this world with something that someone's learned from me.

My work might be sensual to draw you in and then it's gonna slap you a little bit, and that's what I hope I show.