Shabez Jamal
I came back to visit. When I arrived, no one was home.
Kinloch Collage no. 2 (Pawpaw at Boaz Apartments), Digital Collage, 2020
St. Louis and its northern suburbs, specifically the suburban city of Kinloch, have been influential in my theorizing of space and landscape, be it physical, socio-economic, or political, and the inherent relationship said landscapes have with Black subjects. Kinloch, a city just north of St. Louis, has a long and complicated history that has left the city, once a site of Black community and self-sufficiency, a shell of its former self. Through state-sanctioned ordinances, the city and its history, my history, have violently been obliterated. The result of this catastrophic expulsion of the community is a vast swath of urban landscape overgrown with foliage and spotted with the ruins of institutions that once sustained this Black Mecca.
— Shabez Jamal
Hear from the Artist
Shabez Jamal remarks the inspiration and impact of his granmother that he embodies in his art series, I came back to visit. When I arrived, no one was home.
About the Artist
Donny Bradfield (b. 1992, St. Louis) better known as Shabez Jamal, is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. His work, rooted in still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations. Focusing his lens on fat, black, queer, male-identified persons, who are often seen as the antithesis to blackness/queerness, his work acts in radically redefining the parameters of racial and sexual identity. Jamal holds a Bachelor of Liberal Studies, with an emphasis in Studio Art and Western Art History, from the University of Missouri – St. Louis, and an Associate of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Photography from St. Louis Community College—Florissant Valley. As of 2020, Jamal is pursuing his MFA at Tulane University in New Orleans where he was also awarded a Mellon Community-Engaged Research Fellowship.
