Digital Art by Marcellous Lovelace

Artist’s Statement:

The art form that I practice is painting in mixed media with found materials. I paint from my experience living on the South Side of Chicago and living in poverty-stricken America. I use found objects throughout the world as references to my surroundings in my work. Not only that, but I work on everything from old found pieces of paper, garbage cans, tires, and mattresses to used construction material found from torn-down buildings. My travels and growing up in Chicago, a diversely segregated environment, influence struggle and pain. I learned to call myself an Afro-Urban Indigenous Folk Artist, a term that reflects both ancestral memory and contemporary survival. The tragedies that occur in my city help me reinterpret the oppression on all surfaces. I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago in a community called Roseland. This segregated, poverty-stricken environment helped me to develop over 400 images a year over the last 30 years of my life. My environment is so negative it helps me to create beauty from this struggle. I paint because it’s the only thing that feels good after feeling like I’m trapped in a world that has no hope. This process reflects the tradition of Black creative resistance, where art functions as both survival and testimony similar to the role of spirituals, blues, Hip Hop, muralism, and quilt-making in Black history. Like the Gee’s Bend quilters, who transformed scraps into visual language, my work reclaims what society discards and turns it into evidence of presence, intelligence, and humanity.

Strictly from the Soul

Sun-Protected Through Crowns

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