Can Artists of Color Just Create, or Does Our Work Always Have to be Political?

2nd July 2024

Kylie Marsh

Image pulled from Shayla Thornton’s instagram @jerrycurl_activator featuring their work in Joe Van Gogh coffee shop.

Many people use the act of creation, whether it be playing music, putting together models, or filling out coloring books to de-stress. For mixed-media artist Shayla Thornton, her creative process is self-soothing. 

Thornton’s style is immediately identifiable: repeating organic lines come together in a rhythmic pattern of clouds evoking the image of sea anemone or coral. 

“I started drawing out of anxiety, and then  once I ran out of stuff to do on the page, I just kept doing it over and over again; so then I just started building upon it,” Thornton said. “Now I kind of see it like tool, or almost like a building block to create a different world or kind of a different layer of the world.”

The physical act of drawing repeated lines is a practice in mindfulness for the artist. Expertly, she is able to make a cohesive visual language out of the organic shapes and patterns without making her pieces too noisy or busy. 

“Pretty much once I start drawing, sometimes I'm not even really thinking about what I'm doing and then I just get it out,” she said. “I've done some pieces where, in my opinion, I feel like I overdid it, but then some people really like it.”

Thornton’s most recent exhibition, on display at the Joe Van Gogh coffee shop on Shannon Road in Durham, calls back to her first installation, Mental Haven, in 2018. Thornton’s statement for Haven explores this self-soothing in detail:

“The process of creating the work for this installation has become a coping mechanism for how overwhelmed I am with my growing awareness of racial inequality…The repetitive line work suggests dimensional soft forms that have become, for me, a symbol of comfort that eases my anxiety with my identity. First, my work is for black people who go through anxiety with fitting into a society that deems them as less than any other race. However, I want to communicate with all who relate and have experienced prejudice that have caused anxiety. My intention with this installation is to create a space that others can enter and feel like they are in a safe and understanding space.” 

Haven’s palette mixes oranges and mustard-yellow with of jewel-toned blues and teals. At first, bits and pieces of the clouds, or bubbles, take the viewer deeper into the installation, until the backdrop  envelops viewers in the clouds of color, providing a safe, creative space for authenticity. In contrast, Thornton’s Joe Van Gogh exhibition uses a calmer palette of cerulean and eggplant, stimulating a meditative environment through the bubbles floating along the walls in the space. More 

After developing her own visual language, Thornton has begun to include aspects of human portraiture in her pieces: sometimes the blobs of color shroud the subjects, other times the subjects are one with the shapes themselves. Layers of cut-out shapes mimic coral-like structures around the subjects. 

“I started adding portraiture in it as a way of introducing this element to other people, or bringing a comfort aspect to people,” she said.  “When I do portraiture I mainly I only draw black people. In a sense I am bringing comfort to them or surrounding them with these. It's almost like entering a Daydream world.”

Some may see this work as radical simply by the sole act of depicting Black subjects in portraiture. 

“When Black viewers see it, I do want them to take away the value of seeing Black people or Black faces at peace,” Thornton explained. 

Experimenting with this narrative, she conceptualized pictures with Black people sleeping. 

“But then when I was sketching it, it made me think about how we're so used to seeing each other and death sometimes. If there is imagery of our eyes closed, it is more likely death than sweet,” she explained, which gave her pause. “I think it would be interesting to approach it and see different people's reactions to it. Like, do you see a person resting or do you see something scary?”

Thornton graduated from Eastern Carolina University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing. She says that, at times, it felt like her professors pushed her to make work that was explicitly political and centering on her identity, rather than allowing her to express creative freedom. 

“It felt like there was this push for me to be political in their eyes,” she explained, adding that she had no art professors of color. Thornton says there were expectations put on her that she felt like she couldn’t meet. Thronton recalls how after one of her first shows, a White professor from another department who had come to view the exhibition approached her.

“He expressed kind of like, ‘why didn't you tell me?’ or, like, ‘what's the problem?’ I didn't understand what to even get from that because I'm like, what do you want from me? You want me to say, oh, ‘not you?’ It was…it was really bizarre.”

Outside of the constructs of the white gaze, Thornton’s work – and artists of color at large – has meaning and value.  

“It's a weird push and pull,” Thornton explains. “I firmly have value in my identity. I just make my art and don't really necessarily think about it.” 

The process of creating, whether it be visual, musical or performing art, is a way of taking what’s inside and possibly difficult to communicate through words, and translating it through a different language. It’s often spiritual, and that’s exactly how Thornton describes her work. 

“What I'm doing is trying to visualize, or almost reaching back to that time where I had an experience…Like a world that I didn't fully understand and couldn't speak about, but I'm like, still trying to portray it,” she said. “And also seeing it as like aware of myself, which is a Black person.”

While artists’ identities aren’t always central to their work, there will be clues. Kelly Hernandez, mixed-media artist and junior at North Carolina State University, says her work focuses on themes like “women’s sexuality” and “childhood.” 

Being a person of color, a first-generation college student, a part-time nanny, and queer, Hernandez channels the freedom of childlike innocence when piecing together her work. 

“I feel like a child when I’m doing it, or just like expressing something that way,” Hernandez said. “I don’t have to think, I’m just creating.” 

In a similar vein, Hernandez says children are just trying to navigate the world and explore and discover themselves. 

“Children are so open-minded and ready to create. They’re like sponges.” 

This is an essential role to her work as well – discovering and defining her own identity and path in life. Moreso, the act of creating, for Hernandez, is like Thornton’s: it’s the best way that she feels she can communicate and express herself. 

Sometimes, Hernandez says her inspiration comes from sourcing materials: she likes to go to Raleigh flea markets, and find vintage pornography magazines, tattoo, body modification and piercing magazines. 

“I’m just like obsessed with the human form,” she said. As a child, Hernandez’s doodles always included eyes or lips. In her personal expression with clothes and makeup, she goes for a “creepy but cute” look. 

She also likes to use found materials, whether they be notes she finds out in the world or discarded medicine boxes from when she’s ill. Other times, Hernandez says her work focuses on anarchy or “sticking it to the regular regime.” 

Hernandez says sometimes people are shocked that she’s a nanny, but she says she has a lot of patience for children. “I’ve grown to be proud and confident. It doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “It’s about who you surround yourself with.” One of the young girls she cares for told her that her mother would be mad if she expressed herself in an authentic way like Hernandez.

“You know, take your parents’ consideration, but once you stop taking other people's lives into consideration as to your own, then it's more or less then you start feeling okay about yourself and start living.”

“My art doesn't really help political purpose, I feel like it's that's up to the individual artist,” she said. Hernandez has participated in artist markets to raise money for Palestinian relief. One of her pieces, which included text that read “punch a nazi,” seemed to upset an attendee, but Hernandez didn’t care. “With art comes advocacy,” she said.