GAYLETTER: Stephen Towns

Hailing from South Carolina, artist @stephentowns was born the last of eleven children. He was a quiet kid, and when noticing his interest in drawing during elementary school, his parents and teachers encouraged him to continue making art as a means of communication. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, he was taught to live by the “goodness of god,” and remembers growing at odds with the notion that homosexuality was a sin with the penalty of condemnation. He often wondered if his sexuality, if being himself, would keep him from said goodness, though the more he lived, the more he came to recognize the flawed beauty and virtue of all people. When he was studying at University of South Carolina, he experienced an epiphany during a formative art history class and his first visit to a museum, feeling drawn to Italian Renaissance and Byzantine portraiture. The gilded gold backgrounds and halos of the sainted figures intimated their exceptional rectitude and grace. Adopting these markers of high honor in his paintings and textile works, Towns began to develop his own canon of morality focused mainly on the experience of Black people in America throughout the 19th and 20th centuries — on their unflinching determination and their dedication to a better future. Noticing the darkness or crudeness with which rebel revolutionaries have been depicted in the past, he felt compelled to focus on the power and elegance of figures like Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner, positioning them under glittering skies or surrounded by butterflies. Towns is adamant, “How we imagine people matters.”

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Text by @tylerakers
Photography by @malik.dupree

Shot on 120 film - Medium format.