We were lucky to catch up with Chrys Seawood recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Chrys, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

In 2019, I co-authored a chapter in educationist Michelle D. Devereaux’s critically acclaimed Teaching Language Variation in the Classroom. African-American dialects aren’t represented on standardized tests, so my chapter explained my approach to teaching Black students who primarily speak AAVE to decode the language on standardized tests.

In 2022, I became a TEDx speaker twice. My first talk highlighted In Loving Memory…, an art installation I created with my students for an art residency. From 2019 – 2022, I taught at an alternative high school in Washington, D.C. During the pandemic, my students experienced an uptick in the loss of their peers. Inspired by grief practices in their communities, we recreated a candlelight street vigil to honor their loved ones and call attention to the ordinary mediums Black communities use to transform urban environments into works of art.

My second talk highlighted another installation I curated, All on the Court, which explored the basketball court as a safe place for masculine youth to explore a range of emotions without negative social consequences. This installation featured a short film, nearly 400 pairs of basketball shoes donated from all over the country, and stories of basketball players with varying levels of experience on the court.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an educational practitioner and multi-disciplinary artist best known for their immersive and interactive art installations. Their work regards race and gender as constructs imposed upon the body, addressing how they shape our embodied realities and the extent to which we have agency in fashioning new ones. All on the Court (2021–), one of my signature and most popular exhibits, in which she explored the basketball court as a safe space for Black masculine youth, traveled several times in Baltimore before earning her a solo exhibition at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture and a spot on the stage at TEDx Boston.

Body Language: Black Femmes in the Digital Age (2022), a two-person exhibition with DMV-based performance artist Brooke Jay, looked to social media as a subversive cultural site to explore how Black femme women in early adulthood use the digital space to assert bodily agency & disrupt dominant expectations for their sexuality. This steered me in a new direction: Black female sexuality and embodiment.

I am currently conceptualizing my forthcoming work, Pink Matter. A combination of my artistic and educational practices, Pink Matter is an experiential and interactive curriculum that explores Black female sexuality and embodiment. Scaffolded across interactive art installations, multimedia artworks, and educational workshops, this curriculum aims to increase awareness of the sexual self by emphasizing the body’s ability to inspire new forms of sexual expression that may not be fully expressed through words.

My first work within the Pink Matter universe, Channeling Alter Egos to Explore the Erotic Universe Within, is a workshop that debuted earlier this year at the Sex Ed Pop-Up in Baltimore and will be included in the 2024 Let’s Talk About Sex Conference in Washington, DC.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

For black womxn, embodying sexuality can be troublesome. When regarding their somatic history, Black womxn experience unique stereotypes and sexual stigmas that limit their ability to express the sexuality that has traditionally defined them. To fully self-actualize, awareness of the self—as a sexual being and subject—is key. I believe education generates pathways towards self-actualization and social change, yet traditional adult learning environments gatekeep “higher” learning, don’t always speak to the “personal,” and can be complicated by formal assessments and grades. Even for self-directed learners outside of academia, information that is too “heady” and/or dense—though vital for personal development—may deter interest in learning. Research shows learning is amplified when the arts are involved. While traditional methods have value, they aren’t always the most engaging or comprehensive, and consequently, non-traditional learners become marginalized.

Embodiment is a topic that lands in the gray area on the sexual wellness and sex education spectrum and much of sex and sexuality education initiatives address STI prevention and reproduction only, or the “happenings” of sex. Pink Matter deals with the inner world of sexuality as an imaginary space from which to reimagine the sexual self—a critical aspect of self-actualization as an embodied sexual subject.

Given these contexts, I’m curious about the role the arts can play in creating meaningful, educational experiences that provide accessible and fun pathways toward sexuality and embodiment for Black womxn.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I live by the motto, “You can always edit your life.” I began my career as a graphic designer. Unfulfilled with the work I was doing, I quit with no plan. I moved back home with my mom at 26. While home, I started hanging out with my former high school art teacher and his students. Then I stumbled upon substitute teaching and eventually became an English teacher. Everyone assumes I am an art teacher, but the truth is, because I am a mostly self-taught artist, I have insecurities regarding my ability to teach art formally.

As an educational practitioner in the high school and college classroom, I’m known for teaching units like Cardi B and the Future of Feminism and Ambivalent Sexism in Hip Hop. Though these units yield high engagement, I am still limited by space, time, and curricular-based constraints that often leave me overly reliant on traditional methods for instruction and evidence for learning. As an artist, I’ve looked to art to engage the visual and kinesthetic learning modalities that traditional learning environments shelve; however, art spaces haven’t always been receptive to me curating my art around learning objectives.

So, I’m now at a point where I need to pivot again. I need opportunities where I can experiment and innovate new methodologies for teaching and learning outside of the traditional classroom and gallery spaces, where I determine the goals and environment (content, space, objects, etc.) for learning.

Contact Info:

• Website: chrystalseawood.art
• Instagram: @chrys.seawood
• Other: [email protected]

Image Credits
@Vivianmariephoto