Where Do You Go When The Church Burns? Painting

Spray paint stencils, like most street art, are confrontational in nature and hard to look away from; and thus, the subject matter must be equally unflinching. I grab elements from pop culture, own photography, magazine collages, layer them in Photoshop, print them, and hand-cut them until my wrist gets sore. The act of hand-cutting is both meditative and progressive: the more cuts I perform, the more precise they become. Through the alias Rywando Jones, I explore social commentaries, in particular the stigma of mental health especially as it pertains to African-American communities, which merits discussion based on recent racial tensions in the country. To examine Black mental health is to examine the effect of events in both the past and present, how patterns of suffering repeat themselves, and the burden of certain societal expectations. For years, the church is seen as the bastion of black mental health; it is a safe space where people go to express their feelings. Yet throughout history and even today, black churches are burned down, bombed, and attacked. This leaves many folks without an alternative.