LES GIRLS (2024-CURRENT) is an ongoing series that ventures into my experimental sculpture, merging photography, painting, and dimensionality. These works focus singularly on highlighting the lineage of Black Drag and Femme Queens in the 1960s and 70s Queer Ballroom culture, pointing to iconic figures from smaller queer communities, such as those from the House of Sweet Evening Breeze in Lexington, KY, among others.
Rooted in a critical engagement with the politics of the gaze, Les Girls navigates ideas of concealment, fragmentation, and representation. It draws on archival photographs of 20th-century Black queer and femme figures, reactivating these materials through strategies of remix and sculptural intervention. This series embodies an ongoing commitment in my practice to reframing queer memory and expanding historical visibility through the excavation and transformation of photographic ephemera.
Edye in Bloom (2024), the inaugural work of this series, features a reimagined 1977 portrait of Edye Gregory, one of Kansas City’s pioneering Black drag performers. In this piece, Edye emerges from behind a decorative fan—an object deeply rooted in the aesthetics of Black American and Black queer homespaces. This fan, like many domestic artifacts, carries a layered nostalgia: it is both ornamental and functional, a symbol of beauty and grace as well as a tool for concealment and revelation. These sculptural interventions draw directly from the memory of such spaces, where everyday objects hold intimate ties to identity, performance, and survival. The gesture of emerging from behind the fan becomes a metaphor for how Black queer bodies have historically navigated visibility and erasure—using what is available in the home as both shield and stage.
CROSSING THE LINE (2024) is a series of mixed-media collages that bring focus to expressions of gender fluidity depicted through remixed archival images of early 20th-century black queer figures. These works feature archival images of trailblazing queer icons Gladys Bentley, Storme Delaverie, Nellie Small, and Harryette, as well as unidentified masculine-presenting women and gender-fluid individuals from my archive of found vernacular photographs.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, communities such as Harlem and Bronzeville became a haven for queers and gender non-conforming people to challenge social expectations and policing of gender presentation. Crossdressing laws and gender policing made expressions of gender fluidity through clothing illegal in the daylight and confined only to entertainers and performers at night. Sanctions on genderqueer and gender non-conforming people fell under laws like the “3 Garment Rule,” which required at least 3 garments to be in line with assigned genders at birth. Crossing the Line turns the “3 Garment Rule” on its head, highlighting “menswear” worn by presumed women or genderqueer individuals.
My image-making within this series is a compilation of image remixing, deconstruction, and reconstruction as each image is divided into multi-paneled compositions. These collections of images come together to build a visual lexicon of early black butch aesthetics, crossing the hard lines of masculinity and femininity. Each work has a reflexive approach as the image recesses and emerges in parts that form the whole. Each composition focuses on each figure’s approach to performing and embodiment of masculinity.
The breadth of my work and practice addresses queer legibility, imposed concealment, and protective concealment as a means of survival. Crossing the Line is a continuum of that work. The series highlights the audacity and nerve of Black queer women and genderqueer people of the time who dared to choose authenticity even under the threat of criminalization.
MIRAGES OF DREAMS PAST (2021-2023) is a series of large-scale mixed-media collages that bring to focus representations of black queer leisure. The series centers on recollections of intimacy and vulnerability using dreams and the dream space as a vehicle to venture through memory. Imaging vintage black queer photographs, each figure emerges and dissolves, slipping in and out of view, in constant stages of revealing and concealing what can’t be accessed in real-time.
In “Kiss Me Make My World Fade Away,” “Come To My Garden,” and “Close Your Eyes and Remember," Fields creates kaleidoscopic frames that visualize the introspective nature of dreams, while drawing the viewer into hazy mirages of vibrant interiors and exteriors. The repetition of figures and grounds within the work urges the viewer to readjust their way of seeing into memory through an image. The utilization of wax to block colors of various transparencies over these archival images creates portals that visualize both distance and nearness.
By harnessing memory to resurface the past, these works visualize the queer histories we carry in our bodies. The past holds a richness that we must engage with to understand and unpack our collective memories, grapple with the present, and imagine the future. Reflecting upon intimate moments of solitude, freedom, and desire, “Mirages of Dreams Past” traverses through a boundless black queer dream space that amplifies, echoes, and reverberates back to the observer, bringing memory into view.
CONSTELLATIONS
OUR LOVE WAS DEEPLY PURPLE (2020-2021) reflects on queer love between Black women in the early 20th century. Sourced from a patinated 1920s RPPC, this work depicts two black women on a farm, one lying across a carpet mounted atop a tree stump, the other standing behind her in a stance of loving protection. Through zooms, crops, and isolated frames, we encounter this memory slowly in the parts that form the whole. There is nothing that remains unseen, as the violet wax washes over the frames, it accentuates and illuminates rather than hides, forcing us to see deeply.
DOROTHY DANDRIDGE EYES (2022), the inaugural piece from the IN & OUT OF TIME series, confronts the dissolving memory and historical erasure of Black queer icons, bringing their memory into clear view. Sourced from the Faulkner Morgan Archive, this work features a photograph of Leigh Angelique of the House of Sweet Evening Breeze at a 1971 ball in Lexington, Kentucky. Historically, ballroom culture has been credited for emerging into mainstream consciousness from northeastern hubs, particularly New York City. However, Ballroom and Drag culture has roots stretching far into the Midwest, debunking historical narratives that Black queer people's visibility and reimagining of gender was limited by geography. Highlighted in this piece is femme queen performer Leigh Angelique's embodiment of audacious femininity through refined aesthetics and an inescapable gaze reminiscent of Dorothy Dandridge’s seductive stare that reverberates from the surface. The repetition of isolated frames and layered sculptural elements brings this image from the past forward into our consciousness, bringing Black queer femme visibility into focus.
AUDACITY (2020-2021) is a series of mixed media works exploring radical notions and expressions of queerness in black vernacular photography. This series of works highlights the emergence of black queer audacity as a rejection of heteronormativity, looking closely at embodiments of masculinity and femininity through aesthetics, posture, and gesture. With interior scenes from living rooms contrasted with ballroom snapshots, my recapturing of these images zooms in on the origins of black queer culture through behavior and performance.
The variation of visibility through the encaustic paint in this series symbolizes the breaking through of veils while pointing to the complexities and limitations of black queer visibility. In these works, the use of wax is noticeably thinner, symbolizing a layer lifted from the veil of invisibility. We are forced to acknowledge black queer life formally as the choices in clothing, posture, and gesture shift the conversation of coded investigation to one of audacious declaration.
In Audacity, the reconfiguration, cropping, and slicing of these photographs bring attention to the bold and brave choice to be seen fully as a queer black person. Broad bodies in crop tops and manicured hands, particularly placed on hips, replace hard lines and edges. Layered blocks of color highlight the complexities of people reclaiming their existence and non-verbally creating their own narratives. Audacity introduces the power of choice and the agency that such power provides.
AS WE WERE is a series of mixed-media collages exploring the intersections between blackness and queerness and the negotiation of visibility, as they collide in early African American vernacular photography. Through masking and obfuscation, each of the works in this series highlights the paradoxical elements of hypervisibility and invisibility. Framing these images within hard lines, edges, and blocks of color points to the ways that Black queer representation has been obscured, invisibilized, and retained within borders.