Desmond Beach

Work samples

Black Life Is Mourning
Portraits of Insurrection
EB
Untitled

About Desmond

Baltimore County

Desmond Beach is an artist and educator. He earned his MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland institute College of Art (MiCA) and his BFA from MiCA. He has been a visiting lecturer/artist at institutions such as Coppin State University and Emerson College. Beach is currently the 2021-2022 Bayard Rustin Residency Fellow in New York. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Skidmore College as well as an artist-in-residence at the Women… more

View Desmond's Resume

#SayTheirNames

The #SayTheirNames Series sees the artist as an activist, preacher, healer, and prophet, allowing Black people to fully embody their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and images as artwork. The body of work symbolizes one’s sense of duality—Black, American; two thoughts, two souls, two feelings, unresolved strivings, and contradictory beliefs in one’s dark skin, which is held intact solely through its purposeful power. In #SayTheirNames, the works combine historical and contemporary portraits in the foreground and protest images from demonstrations—from the 1960s and Black Lives Matter—collaged on fabric.

The works range in size from 15" x 15" to 40" x 30".

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Introducing the Bird: A Revolutionary Perspective

The watercolor series "Introducing the Bird: A Revolutionary Perspective" addresses the world's frequent marginalization, misrepresentation, and stereotyping of Black people. The works demonstrate that African Americans are not a homogenous community, but rather a multifaceted and varied one. The works are 40" x 30".

Carey
AMERICAN BITTERN
Blue Jays
Greater Bird-Of-Paradise
Keel-billed Toucans
Yellow Warbler
Crowned Plover
Rainbow Lorikeets
The Robin

Stratification of Souls

The Stratification of Souls Project is a collection of work that investigates pictures of Black people from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 14" x 14" pictures are a combination of historical and current images. The photographs are printed on metal in the manner of daguerreotypes and tintypes. The pictures' use of images from the Black Lives Matter Movement speaks to a culture in which privilege is not meant to be equitable. The series' objective is to raise public awareness of institutionalized racism. Recognizing and connecting history to the present helps us follow the path to racial justice and establish anti-racist initiatives as living people.