Work samples
Based on a dream following a travel experience in Sierra Leone and my own quest to discover maternal origins between Sierra Leone and South Carolina. The Dancing ancestral Masquerader is called Nafali and is representative of a guide or messenger. Created to accompany a body of work titled Last Known Address, which was featured in the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
Document capturing my Plein-Air performance at Lynden Sculpture Garden. This was a collaboration that I scripted and performed with local Line Dancers and a Black Cowboy Guild.
This is an ethnographic homage to unincorporated black spaces outside of Charleston, SC occupied by families with long histories of land ownership and proximity to the surrounding waterways. Many of these communities are increasingly at risk for gentrification.My connection is familial.
As an experimental work, the footage was shot on a black magic camera, but with an incorrectly formatted card and matched with B roll caputured with an iPad.
Performing Grace:
A meditation on loss, grace, mercy, forgiveness and forced forgetting in four short performances. I began to think about the many meanings of the concept of grace and the contradiction of the word and these meanings. People perform their "grace" via a forced silence. I love using my mother as an actor, perhaps because I anticipate the loss of her in my life. The first segment is a directed interaction between us, a performance of stopping time.
Short portrait of South Carolina based Indigo textile artist, Arianne King Comer.
digital photography
Student work samples
GRAD THESIS by Lucio Arellano, MFA 2023. Landscapes conflate as an aging immigrant grandfather reconciles with the life he’s built on both sides of the Mexican-American border. An orphanage becomes a museum, a silver mine becomes a sanctuary, and an unfinished home attempts to become complete as translational language politics complicate the threads that tie these sites together.
The filmmaker is assigned to mentor a young person navigating the social and cultural landscape of Milwaukee. The complexity of their relationship comes to bear on the making of the film and later the resolution. Directed by Sansun Choi (MFA alum) when enrolled in an independent study with me, focused on community media production
10-minute version of lengthier collaborative documentary portrait of Walnut Way-Lindsay Heights, made with students enrolled in my Community Documentary Video course in 2011.
MFA Thesis film by Michelle Trujillo, 2020
MFA Grad Thesis by Zachary Epcar-2021
BFA Student from my Documenting Community course in Fall 2022. this video has shown in film festivals.
poetry
Jazz Men (For Jack McCray)
In this Holy City Charleston,
we pour libations & drink
pure shine from a flask fetched deep
from the bosom of
Black joy
In speakeasy spirit houses
we toe tap on creaking wood floors
to pizzicato double bass strings,
gather in parlors of Remembrance
to bear witness to
trickster spirits trance dancing
on the faces of
Jazz men
holding us in an endless embrace.
Holding us.
Genealogy
jazz menEvery step we take is storied¬¬—
Thresholds we cross disturb our dreams
with sacred scripture & preordained callings,
with remembrances we could
never have known
In our wake,
a flakey clay crust adheres
to the backs of our heels,
evidence of low-tide boggin’ &
sleepwalks across the floors
of salt marshes
Just over yonder…
hidden in plain view,
our ancestors sleep deep behind the woods
~close to the water~
where our sanctified steps
lead us toward a cacophony
of names we are hearing
for the first time.
-Portia Cobb
Published in Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth. An Anthology of South Carolina Writers and poets exploring American Racism, 2022 Evening Post Books.