Artist Statement
My interdisciplinary studio practice explores cycles of resilience, transformation, and liberation by weaving together sculpture, sound, cooking, video, mixed media, and social practice. At its core is an inquiry into how everyday materials and cultural traditions, particularly those rooted in Black and African Diasporic communities, can be activated to reckon with the historical legacies of slavery, racial capitalism, and food apartheid while also envisioning liberatory futures. I am especially drawn to domestic forms and food traditions as generative tools for exploring memory, resistance, and care.

A hallmark of my process is deep collaboration. I regularly work with farmers, sound designers, community members, and fellow chefs and artists to create installations and experiences that are communal in both their making and their meaning. I center relationships—with place, people, archives, and materials—and allow these connections to shape the work at every stage. Whether sourcing produce from Black farmers in Northern California, co-creating a zine with a visual artist for a symposium, or hosting a dinner conversation with food justice activists, I treat collaboration as a practice of shared authorship, mutual learning, and political solidarity.

Public engagement is integral to my practice. I create installations and activations that invite tactile (though often challenging in museum spaces), sonic, and multisensory participation, transforming passive viewership into embodied experience. I am committed to making work that lives beyond traditional art spaces: cooking classes, teach-ins, community dinners, and participatory performances are just as vital to my practice as exhibitions. In recent projects, I’ve partnered with organizations like the Cooking Matters program at Ohio Wesleyan University to teach classes on healthful eating and meal planning, and I’ve curated public programs at cultural institutions such as BAMPFA and the Museum of the African Diaspora to bridge scholarship, art, and activism.

Two recent works exemplify the scope of my approach. Razed Bed #2 is a sculptural meditation on Black labor, cultural theft, and ecological crisis, using charred wood, heirloom seeds, and soil gathered from Black farmers to interrogate the historical violence of the plantation and its afterlives. Its minimalist form holds both a critique of racial capitalism and a refusal to surrender ancestral knowledge to commodification. The piece is paired with video and sound elements that trace its making and deepen its narrative resonance.

The Table and the Larder: Feeding the People, Remembering the Future reimagines the domestic pantry and kitchen table as sacred and political spaces. Inspired by my grandmother’s food preservation practices, the Free Breakfast for Children Program, and a photograph by artist Carrie Mae Weems, this multisensory installation features preserved foods from the African Diaspora, archival audio of Fannie Lou Hamer and farmers with whom I’ve collaborated, and a dining table layered with cookbooks, aprons, preservation manuals, and other everyday artifacts. A salvaged window frame holds a photograph of Hamer, symbolically re-centering Black women’s leadership in movements for food and land sovereignty and social justice.

Across all my work, I explore the tension between what is sacred and what is commodified, asking how we might protect and revalue Black cultural practices in a world that seeks to exploit or erase them. By working through the senses and in community, I aim to create experiences that nourish, challenge, and connect—spaces where memory becomes a resource and art a tool for radical care and collective imagining.

(click on the images below to explore Bryant's diverse work.)