Ya’qub Shabazz is a painter and educator whose work explores migration, memory, and the quiet weight of time.

Born and raised in Chicago, with deep family roots in Mississippi, his practice is grounded in the movement of Black life across generations. His paintings hold moments of stillness—figures in transition, compressed spaces, and environments shaped by waiting—where time feels slowed, fractured, or suspended.

Shabazz approaches painting as a form of return. Rather than moving toward resolution, his work revisits the same ideas, images, and memories, allowing meaning to build through repetition, layering, and sustained attention. His visual language draws from personal history, cultural memory, and the textures of working-class environments, where color, surface, and material carry emotional weight.

Alongside his studio practice, Shabazz has spent years teaching art in prisons, community spaces, and academic settings. This work is not separate from his practice—it is central to it. In these spaces, art becomes a method of reflection, a way to document lived experience, and a means of preserving cultural identity in environments where it is often disrupted or erased.

He is currently completing his MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology. His work sits at the intersection of painting, pedagogy, and social experience, positioning the studio as a site of both personal inquiry and collective memory.

There are currents beneath still waters—emotions that move in silence.