Desmond Beach | Time is Filled With Swift Transition

The African storytelling tradition is a thread that runs through Desmond Beach’s series of fiber and mixed media artworks. Honoring his immediate ancestors, as well as those of the African Diaspora, is a priority. Beach’s highest goal is to turn the terrible into the beautiful. His work is inspired by recent and historical developments in the African American experience as well as anti-Blackness. Inspired by images of Black people during the Middle Passage, in the Jim Crow South, and by their representation in today’s mass media, his artwork frequently addresses the racial stereotypes that affect Black people. The work’s deliberateness remixes, reclaims, and reexamines the Black struggle. The works of art serve as a forum for illuminating the existence of the nameless, grief, celebration, and resistance. 
 
Desmond Beach is an artist and educator based in New York City. He earned his MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and his BFA from MICA. Beach is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Plymouth in the UK. He has been a visiting lecturer/artist at institutions such as Coppin State University and Emerson College. Beach has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Skidmore College, an artist-in-residence at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD, and the 2021-22 Bayard Rustin Residency Fellow in New York City, to name a few.