Description

**This class is fully booked. Please email info@powerhousearts.org to join the waitlist** Fugitive Marks is a four session class exploring how improvisation, fragmentation, and found materials can channel personal and cultural memory into abstract art. Students will experiment with reclaimed objects and materials (textiles, papers, oils, etc.) that carry autobiographical or ancestral significance, transforming these “fugitive” marks – seemingly ephemeral scraps and gestures – into powerful visual narratives. Emphasis is placed on Afro-Caribbean and Black American memory: how everyday materials (from a bottle of cooking oil to a scrap of denim) and spontaneous creative acts can hold stories of identity, history, and community. Throughout the class, we draw inspiration from artists who fuse material and memory. For example, contemporary artist Mark Bradford layers torn street posters and found papers from his Los Angeles neighborhood, binding them with string and glue and sanding down the surfaces to reveal hidden colors and textures . His collaged abstractions – one of which is even titled after a Chuck Berry dance move connect to African American urban history and culture. We also look at Cy Twombly’s expressive approach to mark-making, renowned for its “spare, childlike scribbles” that demonstrate the power of raw, improvised gestures. By examining such examples and engaging in hands-on exploration, students will learn to see fragmentation not as destruction but as creation, improvisation as a form of truth-telling, and humble materials as vessels of meaning. The course culminates in a personal mixed-media project in which each student utilizes found materials and abstract techniques to transform fragments of memory into a cohesive, sacred work of art. About the Instructor: DHANTÉ (he/him) is a mixed media artist and educator whose work draws on materials marked by Black childhood and rituals of the Black interior—seed oils, bleach, sandpaper, denim, and other reclaimed fragments. Informed by the Black Church as a vessel for ancestral memory, oral histories, and embodied revelation, his work engages fragmentation and mark-making not as loss, but as revered potential. Destruction isn’t the end. It’s the moment just before something becomes sacred. @dhante.b