Ya’qub Shabazz is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker whose practice develops a visual language rooted in Black American experience, memory, and migration. His work translates lived experience into form—creating images that hold pressure, movement, and the continuity of cultural memory across time.

He works from the belief that culture is too often defined from the outside, resulting in distortion, erasure, and misunderstanding. His practice responds to this by centering lived experience as a primary source of knowledge—creating work that speaks from within rather than about. Through this approach, his paintings function not only as visual compositions, but as acts of preservation, translation, and cultural authorship.

Shabazz’s perspective is shaped by a life that has moved through multiple worlds—growing up on the South Side of Chicago, experiencing incarceration, and later rebuilding through education and art. He understands time not as an abstract concept, but as something that can be lost, stretched, and reclaimed. This awareness informs both the structure and emotional weight of his work, where figures compress, overlap, and emerge as carriers of memory rather than fixed identities.

Working across painting, printmaking, and emerging sculptural forms, his practice examines how identity is formed, carried, and transformed. His compositions often resist linear narrative, instead operating through repetition, layering, and return—reflecting a view of migration as an ongoing condition rather than a singular event.

In parallel with his studio practice, Shabazz has taught extensively in community settings and correctional institutions, using art as a tool for reflection, self-awareness, and transformation. His pedagogical approach positions art as a method of thinking—one that allows individuals to process experience, articulate identity, and engage more deeply with the world around them.

He holds a degree in Sociology and is completing his MFA in Fine Art at Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has been exhibited in galleries and community spaces, and he continues to build a practice that bridges studio work, teaching, and cultural engagement.