Steven Cozart is an artist, educator, and documentarian who loves to draw and, despite being colorblind, enjoys painting. Most of his work is figurative and reflects thoughts and musings regarding his own life, circumstances, and events that he has experienced over the years.
His work is reflective of his thoughts and feelings about interactions and identity in Black America, focusing on stereotypes of the African American Male and Female within the paradigm of the African American Community. Specifically, he has noted the use of codecs (devices that compress data to enable faster transmission of that data; also decompresses data received) to quickly pack and unpack information about African American men and women amongst themselves. These codecs may take many forms, such as a brown paper bag (or colorism, as related to skin tone) or a pencil (or texturism, as related to hair texture). The skin tones and hair textures themselves then serve as codecs.
He has also noted the perceptions of the Black Male within the community as well. One of the subjects of an image spoke specifically to this, and it was conversations such as these that inspired a series of works regarding Black Males.
The goal of his work is to begin a conversation within a public space about why these things are so prevalent within the African American community, given the community’s history in the United States.
He hopes to provide a safe space for dialogue so that the community can fellowship and reason together to move beyond these fallacies and negative stereotypes.