Conditioned Calm: Now on View at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art
I'm honored to share that my piece Conditioned Calm is currently part of the 13th Annual HBCU Art Showcase at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, a juried exhibition presented in partnership with The New Orleans Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, spotlighting work by students from Louisiana's HBCUs in the museum's Education Gallery.
About the Work
Conditioned Calm is a diptych that reflects on how emotional restraint is learned early, shaped by environments that reward composure over expression. Within structured, familiar spaces like the classroom and the home, calmness becomes less instinctive and more conditioned, something repeated until it feels natural.
The work sits in the quiet space where desensitization takes hold, where reactions soften and stillness becomes routine. It invites viewers to consider what is absorbed over time, and what remains beneath that surface.
The Two Halves of the Frame
The diptych pairs two settings that shape a young Black man's life: the classroom and the living room. In the first frame, a student sits composed at a desk, hand pressed to his chest, surrounded by the visual language of early education, posters on fairness, manners, growth mindset, emotions. Behind him, a figure delivers a paper bag with a handwritten note from "Mom," an onion tucked inside. The gesture is small, almost absurd, but it sits there as a quiet test of composure amid the lessons on the wall about how to behave, how to share, how to be "good."
In the second frame, that same calm is carried into adulthood. A man in a crisp white dress shirt sits in a living room, a tie pulled taut around his neck signifying the thought of lynching or suicide, an image of restraint made literal. Around him sit an ironing board, a stack of books, a television tuned to a news broadcast, and posters quoting Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr., voices on empathy, fairness, and foundation, their mouths, ears, and eyes partially obscured to signify speak no, hear no, and see no evil.
Together, the two scenes trace a line from the conditioning that begins in childhood to the composure expected of Black men in adulthood. It's the quiet performance of "fine," rehearsed until it no longer feels like a performance at all.
Why This Work, Why Now
This piece comes from sitting with a question I keep returning to: what does it cost to stay calm? Not the kind of calm that comes from peace, but the kind that's trained, the kind you learn to perform so early that you stop noticing you're performing it. Conditioned Calm isn't an answer. It's an invitation to look at the rooms we grew up in, the posters on the walls, the lessons we were handed, and ask what got absorbed, and what's still sitting underneath.
Visit
Conditioned Calm is on view now as part of the 13th Annual HBCU Art Showcase in the Education Gallery at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp Street, New Orleans. The showcase highlights work by students from Dillard University and Xavier University of Louisiana, presented annually in partnership with The New Orleans Chapter of The Links, Incorporated.
If you're in New Orleans, I'd love for you to stop by and spend some time with it in person. There's a quiet weight to this piece that a photo on a screen can't fully carry.
