Paradise is a project centered around the systematic destruction of Black space in the early half to mid 20th century in the United States. The project uses archival images that captured Black communities and spaces before they were altered, divided and in some cases completely razed and in the case of Detroit's own Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods. This work layers history, geography, social relations, and the present, laying them next to each other to create an image that is not only wholly of Detroit, but also America, using Detroit as a point of study. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were two prominent Black neighborhoods razed for the construction of highway 375 built in the 1950s, to aid traffic to the growing white Detroit suburbs. The use of highway construction to divide, and even eradicate, Black communities was common practice across the country throughout the mid 20th century. 

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This body work centers the story of the loss of this community, but it is also about the resilience of a people and creating anew. Using images, found in the Detroit Public Library’s Archive, the work captures a community just a few years before it was displaced and razed. The images were woven, cut apart/ dismantled, reassembled, and embellished. Collaging images of an imagined exodus leaving a community, and entering a fictional space, where paradise is both found and created. With this work, I am laying the promise of "The Garden of the West" next to the 1950s destruction of Black infrastructure. Honoring the contemporary resilience of Black Detroiters creating the community to find a way through, while simultaneously understanding that the displacement of Black Americans is continuous and systematic. The space in the African diasporas is permanent– it can be entered, but one can never leave. It is finding paradise over, and over, and over again.