Isaiah Lopaz

My current work utilizes genealogy, family records, and the results of multiple ancestry DNA tests as framing devices that analyze where histories often framed as disparate and distinct overlap and converge. My family's recent lineage has been shaped by racism, the colonization of Africa and Turtle Island, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I am a descendant of people of African, Creole, First Nations, British, and European descent, including the Dutch. Through collage-based works including works on paper, canvas, video, and interactive works, histories and continuities of brutality, transformation, and destruction are brought into conversation with one another, as they have been throughout my family's histories and the histories of many other groups, communities, and cultures. My artistic research data, fragments, clues, and missing information are composed visually and theoretically through intersecting epistemologies and cosmologies that I have cultural kinship with. Working with collage as a foundational medium, my practice has expanded to include sound and sculptural works.

In 2024, I founded Black Visual Grammar, a mobile cultural program which uses collage and exhibition practices to map Black perspectives on an array of themes and subjects. Unfolding across editions, each iteration begins with a two day collage workshop, followed by a public exhibition. Exhibition formats can include installation, performance, sculpture, digital media, film, site-specific works, and printed matter. Each edition begins with a call for contributors, anchored around a query or prompt. During workshop sessions, contributors have access to an image library of over a thousand images. The main body of this library includes images that I have collected for over a decade, as well as other images that I curate prior to each edition. Black Visual Grammar facilitates public engagement between myself, audiences, and the concerns, imaginings, and methodologies that I work with.