CONTACT: Mistermroman@gmail.com

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#MichaelBoydRomanisworthit

Overwriting the Archive:

My work portrays the ordinary grace of the contemporary Black experience by blending elements from hip-hop and urban culture with art history and religious iconography. In showcasing divine Black beauty, I offer contemporary images that are positive and spiritual to counter long-held narratives applied to representations of Blackness. Drawing on canons and iconographies that have historically concentrated sanctity, prestige, and purity within a narrow ideal, I re-seat my figures in those positions. I call this process overwriting the archive—a futurity practice that writes forward by inscribing new images into inherited visual memory.

 This project is rooted in the realities of cultural loss and ancestral rupture. For many Black Americans, the legacies of slavery and the transatlantic trade have left a disconnect from lineage: family histories often halt after a few generations, and even extended searches rely on DNA results that only approximate regions of origin. That distance generates grief and a desire for reconnection. Some pursue more Afrocentric identifications with cultures that resonate, even absent direct genealogical proof. My work studies these manifestations of grief and the attempts at reconnection while honoring ever-present ancestors and their endurance within collective cultural memory. Overwriting the archive, here, means repairing connections by composing images that carry forward lineages interrupted on paper but alive in practice.

 Rarely is the Black body depicted as a manifestation of the divine. Popular culture tends to instrumentalize Black imagery for social or political ends. In my practice, I remove socio-political signifiers so the figures cannot be read through wealth, class, or station. Body language and facial expression draw attention, inviting viewers into conversation and returning interpretive responsibility to their own assumptions. The images resist reduction and surface implicit bias without didactic cues—another mode of overwriting the archive.

 Through drawing, ephemeral installation, video, and digital media, I connect concepts across time, space, and race. No culture holds exclusive claim to the human range of feeling, yet some artistic expressions have been historically privileged while others have been undervalued. By placing expressions from traditions often treated as incompatible into deliberate relation, my work underscores that respect for difference begins with recognizing the divinity present in those who appear different. In doing so, it overwrites the archive toward futurity—contributing images that make room for what comes next.