Lloyd-Princeton Cangé

MFA Painting

The Maroon Cycle: Overture

From the moment they landed in the colonies until the end of the Civil War, enslaved Africans in North America escaped into forests, swamps, trees, and caves. They flew into untamed nature for myriad reasons and varying lengths of time. Sometimes they stayed for a few days and sometimes for years, building homes, communities, inventing and sustaining economies. They led lives filled with ingenuity, vigilance, creativity, and daring that allowed them to live with a great degree of autonomy.

This practice is called maroonage, and the people who practiced it, maroons. With this history as a stage, I allow my myriad other influences and interests– from Arthurian legend to voodoo to class politics– to seep in and inform what is becoming an epic story. Within these stories lies the impetus for my work that encompasses narrative painting, drawing, instillation, collage, and soon, books as well.

I follow in the footsteps of the great narrative artists who came before me, notably those of Northern Renaissance and my contemporary forebears, especially Jacob Lawrence, Henry Darger, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Firelei Báez, Chris Ofili, Mark Thomas Gibson, and Trenton Doyle Hancock among many others.

This work would also be impossible without my intellectual and literary forebears– James Baldwin, David Graeber, Achille Mbembe, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Frank B. Wilderson, and Sylvia A. Douf, whose brilliant book– Slavery's Exiles– cemented my path. I am forever in their debt.