ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a communications artist creating narratives that delve into human experiences related to culture and causes.  Through photographs, videos, digital drawings, prints, and paintings, I strive to reveal multicultural people through their diverse histories, hues, and heritages. My works are visual conversations transcending limitations of language and preconceived looks to show familiar stories from perspectives historically missing in artistic traditions.

My eyes and hands gravitate toward faces and spaces often ignored and neglected by history and tradition. Sometimes I use a flood of vibrant colors to record the complexities of cultures, races and ethnicities. A face inspires me. It is a living storybook on life. Nothing reveals the passage of time, an inner feeling, or an outward search for identity more than the portrait of a person.

To see beyond the boundaries of bias notions is my intent. By capturing universal images from a multicultural perspective, glimpses of life outside cultural comforts are explored. Distorted beliefs based on skin color are rectified by visually retelling common histories. Through reexamining more moments connected to a multitude of cultures, the expansiveness of the human experience is acknowledged.  

BIO

Floydetta McAfee is an evolving artist. As a child growing up on military posts throughout the United States and Germany, her life was spent constantly moving, meeting new people, and discovering new cultures. Having lived in Germany as a youth with limited understanding of the language, her family’s form of entertainment was reading books and visiting museums. Those regular museum visits sparked her love of art, while books cultivated her interest in storytelling. Her formal art training began in grade school, extended through high school, and continued with private lessons. In college, she turned toward written communications where she developed a strong interest in using verbal and visual storytelling to connect diverse communities and cultures to social issues, brands, and each other. 

Art impacts Floydetta’s work as a communications specialist focusing on multicultural media relations. From words to images, she uses verbal and visual tools to produce creative content, messages, and campaigns for corporations, organizations, foundations, and social causes. She works with UNAIDS, Nielsen, and the NAACP Hollywood Bureau providing crisis communications counsel, brand management guidance, and cause-related social media campaigns. She wrote and illustrated the inspirational book, Grown Up ABC’s Momma Taught Me.  In 2016, Floydetta used her creative skills to co-produce and write the PBS World Channel special, Eyes on the Prize: Then and Now.

Floydetta works in all forms as an artist—filmmaking, printmaking, photography and digital drawing. From the Art Students League of New York to the Art League School in Alexandria, Virginia, she takes classes whenever possible forever honing her artistic skills. Many of her photographs have been part of several group exhibitions with Dark Light winning an honorable mention.  

Floydetta’s peripatetic journey continues as she explores the use of communications and creativity to connect diverse communities and cultures. Her nomadic upbringing has informed her art. The diversity of the human spirit is a major influence. The forgotten souls and abandoned spaces; the look on the face of a South African mother; a setting sun on a decaying city block; and the vibrant colorful hues of all human beings inspire her.   

Floydetta lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia.