PERSONAL STRUCTURES

Desmond Beach is an artist and educator based in New York City. His interdisciplinary practice examines Black life in the United States through engagement with histories of racial violence, dispossession, and resistance. Working across fibre, performance, drawing, sculpture, sound, and mixed media, Beach considers the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and the Jim Crow South as ongoing structures shaping contemporary social and cultural experience. His practice is informed by practice-led doctoral research at the University of Plymouth (UK), which explored artmaking as ritual, remembrance, and healing in relation to generational trauma and anti-Black violence. Drawing on Black Baptist traditions, including call-and-response, communal witnessing, prayer, and ritual performance, Beach situates artistic practice within broader frameworks of faith, memory, and collective responsibility.