“I learned firsthand that there is pressure on young black males to move outside into the margins.”
Dessalines, 2014.
About:
Born in 1977 in Miami, T. Eliott Mansa is a traveler of worlds. Not a jet-setting, train-hopping, vagabond of sorts, but he has lived within multiple realms of reality since childhood in the ’80s.
At home, he watched his stepfather struggle with crack addiction, and would later in life battle depression following the death of his mother. Among his peers, he watched many of his friends, even his siblings, succumb to drugs and gang life. At New World School of the Arts, he learned how to paint in order to cope with his surrounding circumstances. Now, all of these experiences have helped him arrive at his latest destination, Yale’s prestigious painting MFA program.
Shango’s Retribution, 2014.
“My family has played a large part in my work. Within the past few years, I realized that I tend to address issues of history, out of the need to create a clearer picture of some of the things I saw as a child. My parents divorced before I was born, and I watched my mother’s second marriage end at an early age. I had no idea what drove the split, or what drove my parents apart, so always had the need to reconcile the issues with my past. I only began to deal with familial issues after my mother passed away, but I dealt with the past, history, and socioeconomic issues in my work as a desire to make sense of my world.”
Water No Get Enemy, 2014.
“I learned firsthand that there is pressure on young black males to move outside into the margins. ‘Normal’ seemed to lead to failure, yet the hare seemed to get more praise than the tortoise. No matter how I tried to dabble into the fast life, I was always reminded that there was something different about me. Others recognized it, but I had to learn to value my uniqueness, rather than seek the validation with some form of street cred. I began to see the kind of duplicity that turns friends against each other when fast money and temptation become the norm. When I began seeing my childhood friends begin to die from gun violence, I started to seclude myself in my studio to find my own center, and start over.”
(quotes from Miami New Times, April 2013. Interview by Briana Saati)
