I am a first-year graduate student in the Education Department studying Clinical Mental Health Counseling. I received my BA in Fine Arts and am a strong advocate for the usage of Art Therapy. Art to me has been my therapy since I was 9 years old. It is the only coping mechanism I know that has helped me through some of the toughest moments in life. I continue to use art as my outlet and tool to address racial identity and life as a Black American. i am a natural painter and it was my medium for a long time before i got to college. painting was also my concentration in college, but it wasn't until my senior year that I switched to just drawing on paper--no color, no paint--just drawing with black pens. I quickly fell in love with contour line work and 'scribbling' art. my recently artworks that are drawings all encompass not necessarily a message but just a story of the individual. I enjoy drawing black people only because they are the faces that I am pulled to draw. Going into each art piece I first throw away any story that may have once been and create my own through the portrait of the person. Portraiture has become my new medium and speciality that I love to draw in all my pieces. Capturing the face and outline of every curve and movement in their eyes, mouth, nose is all so unique to me and it allows me to form my own story out of what I already am looking at. How the art piece is perceived or interpreted is not up to me but instead up to the audience and how they feel. Surprisingly there is no one way angle I'm trying to create or a specific story I wish to tell through my art portraits-- I simply enjoy capturing black folk. Their faces, their bodies, their images are all different and unique and they don't have to be synonymous to Black suffering, hardship, fear, pain and worry. Every art piece I create I make sure to involve joy, peace and sometimes pain when you see it. But I believe that black joy--black subtlety with sometimes no context can be displayed in art and that's what I try to accomplish in each piece.