How so?
We have to be creative. First of all, we can't think of just what will work today. We have to think about the problems and the issues that are going to come up tomorrow, and then we have to figure out how to plan for scale. So think about your car. You don't want your car just to run today and then crap out. You don't want your art just to be relevant today. You want it to be relevant all the way down the road for the lifetime of the art, for it to stand the test of time. Look at the Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa is centuries [old]. In engineering some things don't really work that way. Maybe a chair can stand the test of time. But those are the things that you think about — creativity and longevity.
Local tech has a fraught relationship with artists and people of color. How do you balance enjoying your job with the issues the influx of tech workers has created around affordability?
I sit in the middle of it. There's a disparity of Black people within the tech community. We’re at 3%. I think my vision for how people from marginalized communities can come up is being able to jump into that space and provide representation for people that can't really speak for themselves. So, trying to try to speak the truth to power. I think that's my bridge between the communities. Whether it's mentoring people at hackathons, mentoring people personally, doing resume reviews and recommending candidates to get into these tech companies that might have been overlooked in the past. That's where I fit within that whole conversation.
You’ve mentioned you’re not a painter. What do you consider your medium?
I'm basically a graphic artist. I'm super comfortable with the undo button if I mess up [using Adobe Illustrator]. Painting, I’m kind of intimidated by it, just for the fact that I just don't want to mess up. [Digitally] I can create perfect lines and move and edit things at ease. I was speaking with my friend Joe Nix [a muralist], and he was like, “Use technology to help you. You can solve things a lot faster if you just make a projection, push the projection to a wall, create your outlines and you can pretty much paint anything.” That's something that I want to actually explore a little bit more.
In the video for your Sounders project, you mention a specific painting that inspires your color palette.
Yeah, the painting “International Crisscross” by Philip Romano. The original was in this brunch spot called Nick and Sams in Dallas. As soon as I walked in, I was drawn to it. It was really the centerpiece of that space. It just resonated with me. The For the Culture app colors came from that background, and Para la Cultura colors came from that, too. I try to use that painting as my motif for my color palette.
How did you come up with the idea for the For the Culture app and how does that play into your art?
There's an app I was playing with my family called Heads Up [in which players try to guess a word floating above their forehead with only clues from friends]. I was like, “We can expand this into a new game.” So that was my project, but you gotta have someone that's graphically talented to make the game resonate with people. I worked with an artist out of Canada. His name is Aaron Campbell and he made beautiful graphic designs. He mentored me through the entire process while he was doing it and shared a lot of tutorials. To market the game [For the Culture], I needed to create content and other materials to make sure people were drawn in. That's when I started learning Adobe Illustrator.
“For the culture” is kind of your slogan. What does that mean to you?
I say the phrase a lot when my friends get down, like, “Man, you gotta do it for the culture and you gotta just keep going.” I said it so much that when I couldn't think of a name for the first app, they said why don’t you call it For the Culture? You created it for the culture, it just makes sense.” “For the culture” is giving respect to the ancestors and just knowing where you come from, and trying to do everything to honor those people that went before you.
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