Writing · Criticism · Scholarship
Beauty demands attention. African and diasporic traditions have always known things about pleasure, the sacred, and the good life that the rest of the world is still catching up to. This is where I think those things through — in public, slowly, for you.
For the Reader
This writing is an open door.
Come in seeking something felt and tangible and real — writing that reaches the soul as equally as it does the mind. Not information. Not takes. Something closer to what it feels like to sit across from someone who has genuinely thought about what they are saying and means every word of it.
What you find here is an argument for beauty as a daily practice and pleasure as a birthright. For African and diasporic aesthetics as a living source of wisdom — not an object of study, but a way of moving through the world. For the idea that what we consume — art, music, food, conversation, written and spoken word, anything born from imagination — shapes who we are becoming, and that we are therefore responsible for choosing well.
You will leave slightly reorganized. Not converted. Not instructed. Just — shifted, a little, toward the light. Which is, I am convinced, where we are all heading anyway.
The Voice
“I write as
hospitality —
to share my heart
with you.”
I write as resistance and as advocacy. As love made legible. I actually truly believe — perhaps naively — that the love of anything can become the love of everything, and that it is therefore our responsibility to multiply that love in all ways, through all channels, tactfully and playfully and passionately, even in government, in business, in society. Especially so. It is within this all-encompassing romantic undercurrent that I have found my footing in work that wants to challenge the ordinary.
I write because I have a gift for finding beauty in the mundane. Because I believe in the human experience as just that — an experience. Not a problem to be optimized, not a market to be captured, but a lived, felt, sensory, relational experience that deserves to be taken seriously in all its dimensions. I sometimes sit and imagine what we would look like from outer space: all of us marching in and out of our ant hills, one thing to another, in a repetitive yet somehow discernible pattern. What are we really doing? And why is so much of it causing harm?
The argument running through everything I write is not confined to the art market — though the art market is a sharp and clarifying place to make it. It is an argument about the entire consumption economy: music, visual art, food, conversation, spoken and written word, anything that is created from imagination. We are responsible for the good and the beautiful — whether that means authenticity, or art, or stories, or lived experiences, or healing. We all deserve a platform. And we all owe something to the people whose creative inheritance we consume.
I leave room for wonder, imagination, intangibles, less obvious and sometimes controversial perspectives — for the culminating purpose of just doing better than where we started. Through all the pain, we are winning collectively. There is a heck of a lot more light coming through than darkness. I am convinced of that.
The Publication
A living publication on African art, curatorial practice, intentional living, the philosophy of pleasure, and what we grow from. Four columns, one sustained argument: that beauty is not decoration — it is a way of being alive, and it is how we build a life worth living.
Artist portraits, exhibition notes, and what I am putting on Artsy — and why. Intimate, behind-the-scenes, story-first. For collectors and art lovers.
How to create sacred space with African art, ritual and everyday beauty, the collector’s wellness guide. Broadest audience — the entry point into the practice.
What I am reading and why it matters to how I see art, culture, and living. Glissant, Girard, decolonial theory, African philosophy. For serious readers.
The deep philosophical work. Crossover from Black Star News. Calling out extraction — but in a teaching voice, offering African practice as the solution.
Free to start. Paid subscribers get the Collector’s Guide series, private studio visit dispatches, early Artsy access, and curated acquisition recommendations. $12/month — less than a cup of coffee a week.
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Selected Writing
These are the pieces that best represent the range and depth of my critical voice — from close readings of individual artists to structural arguments about the global art market, to the philosophy of intentional living.
An argument about the difference between acquiring African art and supporting African art — and what institutions and private collectors owe to the cultures whose creative inheritance they hold.
On how artists like Bruce Onobrakpeya and George Egunjobi use Yoruba, Igbo, and Edo traditions not as nostalgia but as fuel — and what that demands of curators and collectors who encounter the work.
How the Buddhist concept of reducing karma through intentional action applies not just to objects, but to relationships, habits, and the quality of attention we bring to our daily lives.
Édouard Glissant argued that cultures have the right to exceed the understanding of those who encounter them. Here is what that means when you are the person deciding which works go on which wall, in which order, for which audience.
Ghariokwu Abiodun Lemi designed the visual language of Afrobeat. This essay is about what happens when a graphic artist becomes the visual conscience of a political movement — and what collectors who want to live with that history actually owe it.
Mimetic Desire and the West African Contemporary Art Market
This paper applies René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to the West African contemporary art scene — arguing that the market’s distortions are not anomalies but the predictable result of desire shaped by what others desire, value determined by who is watching. The algorithm amplifies this. What it cannot hold is the weight, ceremony, and communal function of the work itself.
How Indigenous Spiritual Traditions Were Targeted as Instruments of Control
A scholarly manuscript examining how colonial powers systematically targeted indigenous spiritual traditions — their practitioners, their objects, their ceremonies — not because those traditions were violent, but because they were the primary site of cultural resistance, communal memory, and political identity. And how art, in the aftermath, reclaims that ground.
Speaking & Press
I speak at conferences, institutions, brand events, and panels on topics where I have something specific to say — not a survey, always an argument. My talks are built around a genuine point of view.
Available for keynotes, panels, workshops, and institutional residencies. Virtual and in-person. Response within two business days.
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