For my visual arts practice, I use choreography to paint, hand clapping to splatter, I use voice to sing and make music. I listen to recorded church services, clap and dance and play the tambourine to the rhythm of the sounds and music with paint on my hands or feet. I use paint, ink and canvas, paper and other surfaces to visualize that which remains after my body moves to the sound of the music and of praise, to more fully consider residue, lingering, that escapes capture. And I use sound practices to bring together Neo-classical music with Blackpentecostal praise and sounds of the Hammond organ.

Having grown up and learned about life and love in the spiritual space of Blackpentecostalism, the flesh was the conduit through which praise and worship happened. But the flesh was also a thing to control and renounce because it was always prone to sin. The doctrine about queerness as antithetical to joy and holiness is a doctrine I had to first reconcile, and eventually reject.

In April 2019, I organized “Antiphony, Otherwise: A Hammond Organ Symposium” that was a day-long conference gathering scholars and practitioners to discuss the role of the Hammond Organ in Black Christian communities. The day ended with a curated sound event, “Testimony Songs and Devotion,” similar to and the extension of “Friday Joy Night Service,” a curated sound event I organized for April 2017, titled “Antiphony, Otherwise: Friday Joy Night Service.” Both “Friday Joy Night Service” in 2017 and “Testimony Songs and Devotion” in 2019 provided a space for thinking about questions of identity and religiosity, of sound and space. While the audience sang, listened to, and clapped along to gospel songs that featured the musicianship of a Hammond organist, soul food—fried chicken, fried fish—was prepared for the spaces.

In 2023, I had a sound and visual installation on display at the National Mall in Washington DC (August 18-September 18, 2023) titled HOMEGOING—a sonic memorial that honors Black church musicians, choir directors and singers that were impacted by the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s, a memorial that honors queerness and spirituality. I have also had visual work at the California African American Museum in the Enunciated Life exhibit. And I had both sound and visual artwork in an exhibit titled Otherwise/Revival at Bridge Projects in Los Angeles. The sound piece in Otherwise/Revival, titled “yes! lord.,” brought together various cultural traditions—the neoclassical music of Steve Reich; the improvisatory drive of black church choral music; the chanting of the Blackpentecostal “yes” and “yes, lord”; and the sound of the Hammond organ.

The word and concept “yes” in the Blackpentecostal Church is about openness, surrender, vulnerability. Black life, blackqueer possibility, is the continual unfolding of the posture and practice of “yes,” the practice and posture of vulnerability and openness and letting-be, and allowance and yielding as a way of life. My writing, particularly Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, served as conceptual/foundational framework for both the “Enunciated Life” exhibit, curated by Taylor Renee Aldridge, and the “Otherwise/Revival” exhibit, curated by Jasmine McNeal and Cara Lewis.