COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity           COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity

The Project



Art Partner and Jawara present "COARSE: The Edges of Black Ingenuity", a virtual exhibition featuring published and unpublished images which show hair as a lens for storytelling. Jawara, a hairstylist born in New York and raised in Jamaica, speaks about the power of hair, "I Believe HAIR is a complex and multi-faceted subject to grasp. Especially when it comes to discussing Black hair. The narrative of Black hair is rooted in the art of storytelling. Essentially, every hairstyle tells a story." The greatest representation of a movement, is found in its artwork, of all mediums, art, music, clothes, and in Jawara's case, hair. Working with Art Partner, I created different 3D hair sculptures to emphasize the beauty of self expression, a message really pushed forward by Jawara. Working directly from Jawara's hair models featured in the exhibition, I re-created the hairstyles to materialize them as a piece of art as to be preserved in a musuem.

The music that was chosen for the video is by Sister Carol, Jawara's mother, one of his earliest inspirations.

The Process



To create the 3D hair models, I used direct image references to recreate the hairstyles in Autodesk Maya. I imported the references onto image planes, and modeled the styles directly over the image to maintain scale and proportions. Because the intended purpose of the models was static, I used nHair as a starting point for the models. Following some manipulation within the parameters of nHair, I converted the simulation into geometry, making it easier to manipulate. For a lot of the manipulation, I used lattice boxes so the hair followed a more natural curve while maintaining its original shape.