My practice takes the largely oral and embodied tradition of my communities (Black, Trans, Queer, Appalachian) and brings them into public, academic, and art spaces via mixed media work, performance, dance, and education, in an effort to shift the dominant canon

At the core of my practice, I document the undocumented. My home communities (Black/Appalachian/Trans/Queer) rely on largely oral and embodied traditions to share information, to sustain ourselves and bloom in hostile soil; as a person who crosses daily between worlds of grassroots Queer/Black survival and comparatively more well-resourced cultural spaces, I strive to carry what matters along with me. I make visual work that iconifies my cultural heritage and aesthetics while centering values of joy, celebration, pride, and empowerment. To expand and embody this further, another crucial dimension of my practice is stage performance and activating spaces for dancing and resource-sharing, honoring the history of community building rooted in my ancestry.

First and foremost, I make work for myself and others like me, to indulge in the celebration of our beauty, divinity, and light, to see ourselves represented in spaces we are often kept from, and to connect us to our growing legacy and rich history. I strive to bring this work into academic, gallery, and museum spaces, and other institutions that have historically removed, hidden, destroyed, stolen, or passed over our legacy, voices and stories. While my references are specific, I do not enjoy the label “identity work” applied to my practice in a reductive manner, because all artists put their history, knowledge, and experience into their work. To classify the work of the global majority as identity work is an attempt to place it in the margins, an attempt to other it and devalue it. 

Through painting, sculpture, illustration, performance, and ritual, my current work is documentation, religious artifact, lore, and history, of an imagined world that is Black, Trans, and Queer at its core. A world of Divine beings, spirits, practitioners, demons, all participating in an endless dance and cycle of self discovery, growth, empowerment, and rebirth. With its own language (Qyrd) and pantheon of divine houses, this work elevates cultural and historical elements of my communities to a space of celebration. It represents the endless cycle of growth, healing, re-birth, survival, and empowerment that is at the core of the queer experience. Ancestry, legacy, hardship, what is passed down or carried on, the cultural elements that survive or are invented, are all reimagined through a lens of mythos. 

The Black Queer community is a generator of culture and aesthetics. What is created within our spaces is shared, stolen, spread, and adopted by popular culture at large, with all connection or remembrance of its genesis lost. I aim to remedy this by honoring the culture, both historical and contemporary, through the lens of this created world.

Currently living and working in Peoria, IL

Email:   xander9210@gmail.com

Instagram: @ms_alexander_martin

@ArtemisiaVanHo

 Project1612:  project16twelve@gmail.com

              http://project1612.com