नमस्ते
Hello, I'm an American artist working with textiles and technology. I hold a MFA in Digital + Media from Rhode Island School of Design, a MA in Art Education from New York University, and a BA in Visual & Performing Arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This site has some artistic processes but kindly contact to see more for curatorial & other professional purposes.
My latest research
🌊 Over 100 years ago my great-grandfather (& possibly great-grandmother) landed on a voyage from India to the Caribbean after slavery ended to work on a sugar plantation.
🌾 Descendants like me know the struggles & stories of survival despite our history being understudied. It is also British mythology that the newly invented indentured labor system was an immediate success to Transatlantic slavery.
📋 In 2013, CARICOM developed a Ten Point Plan For Reparatory Justice for economic development in the Caribbean that doesn’t include the descendants of Asian indentured laborers from India and China. However, they list museums and cultural institutions as resources to help educate. After everything that has happened in the last ten years, doesn't this plan also need an update?
⚓️ There are ship records that link one land to another for ancestors who made the journey. West Indian Diplomacy created a petition last year to preserve and digitize Indian indentured servant and enslaved African records in the Caribbean. Finding my great-grandfather's record has been very meaningful for me and I wish the same for others.
📚 I arrive at this work as a mixed race descendant artist who believes depicting historic stories in creative ways helps illuminate understanding. Art asks questions and design solves them. If the Art of my personal, cultural, and filial histories can create understanding then the Design of the modified CARICOM Ten Point Plan & the digitized ship records can help many people.
💪🏽 I also have interests in AI as a way to develop incomplete narratives. If these technologies are partnered with histories like mine, the outcomes can only be beneficial for the future. Science fiction has demonstrated what some possibilities are; what can human history show us?
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