The Online Series - Collaborators
Steven Montinar • Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Mixed Media + Installation
Interpreting the word “Racist/m” in The Online Series
Steven Montinar was born in Rockville, Maryland to Haitian immigrants in 1999 whose want to assimilate progressed into a loss of culture. This disconnect from Haitian and American customs drove Steven to investigate his identity.
After enrolling at Carnegie Mellon University in 2017, Steven materialized his search of self through video and sculpture. These pieces highlighted systemic oppression of blacks in America which were his way of accepting identity by empathizing with suffering. Yet, mulling over a doomed fate was not a way to be content. Therefore, Steven reshaped his practice with the lens of hip hop. Influenced by its use of gesture, sampling, and language, he formed work against the white gaze and paid homage to the contributions of a unified black society.
While working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Steven has held 9 exhibitions, won 5 awards (including The Pittsburgh Foundation: Advancing Black Arts Grant), and partnered with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.
As a black male in America, I have learnt that the systems and concepts that make America function are not processes meant to help individuals who look like me function, although black slave labor built the country from the ground up. As a response, I create art that highlights the everyday oppression of black individuals in America; and i develop works acknowledging and paying homage to the contributions of black society. The four cornerstones of my work include the subject matters of black culture, hip hop, appropriation, and thought process. More specifically my concepts are incited by the gestures within black culture, the language of hip hop, the parallel of ownership and reparation in the action of appropriation, and an analysis of black perception through a psychoanalytic investigation of thought processes. My work is meant to incite conversation; I understand conversation is the only vehicle for change, art can only prompt it.