“The world speaks quietly through light, posture, silence, color, and even the spaces between words. Most people look long enough to recognize something familiar. Very few remain present long enough to truly understand what they are seeing.”

Ya’qub Shabazz

The eyes perform the act of looking, but the mind processes meaning. We can spend our entire lives looking at the sky without ever truly seeing it. Then one day we study painting and suddenly realize the sky is not simply “blue.” It contains cobalt blue, ultramarine, hints of alizarin crimson, reflected light, atmospheric shifts, temperature changes, and subtle variations we never noticed before.

For some people, confinement creates deterioration. It breaks people down mentally and emotionally. But for others, something else happens. Some individuals develop profound interior lives.

What I was hearing in music started to meet what I was seeing in real time. The conversations got sharper. The language got more direct. Hip-hop wasn’t just something you listened to—it was something you moved through.

That’s how I came into art myself. Not through some clean, straight path, but through experience. Through movement between places. Through memory that doesn’t sit still. Mississippi is in me whether I’ve lived there or not. Chicago shaped how I see space, rhythm, pressure, survival. All of that shows up in the work. So when I teach, I’m not trying to shape people into some idea of what an artist is supposed to be, or what a “better person” is supposed to look like. I’m trying to get them to recognize that they already come with something. Something real. Something worth building from.

That is something I’ve come to understand, whether in teaching or in the studio. What sits beneath the surface doesn’t go away just because it’s covered. It remains active.