J. Rycheal

J. Rycheal (they/them) is a Black queer interdisciplinary artist, writer, griot, and cultural documentarian from Macon, Georgia, living and working in Seattle. Moving across photography, film, poetry, essays, visual art, and performance, their practice explores memory, ancestry, identity, place, grief, spirituality, and belonging.

Raised in the Black South, Rycheal comes from a long tradition of people who made meaning through story. Their work is deeply concerned with the distance between the official record and what people remember, especially the histories carried through families, bodies, photographs, rituals, oral traditions, and the places we call home. They are drawn to what we inherit without choosing, the identities we learn to inhabit in order to survive, and the complicated process of deciding what belongs to us and what does not.

Rycheal often turns the lens toward their own body, life, and family archive, using personal history as a way into larger questions about Black identity, Southern life, generational memory, spirituality, and our relationships to the people who came before us. Their work moves between documentation and self-examination, making space for grief, tenderness, humor, contradiction, pleasure, and possibility to exist alongside one another.

At the heart of Rycheal’s practice is a desire to tell the truth as they understand it, preserve what might otherwise be forgotten, and question the stories we inherit about who we are supposed to be. Their work is part of their own practice of becoming more fully themselves, while holding space for others to do the same.