Exploring the World of Ken Oswald “__yak” Vann Jr. | Atlanta's Mixed Media Creator

I make work for people who know history is not dead. It just keeps changing clothes.

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My practice lives somewhere between painting, collage, archive, protest, testimony, and cultural memory. I work with mixed media because one material has never been enough to tell the truth. Acrylic paint, torn book pages, newsprint, burlap, scripture, stencils, graffiti marks, metallic leaf, splatter, and texture all show up because that is how history shows up in real life: layered, damaged, beautiful, contradictory, and still breathing.

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I am not interested in making clean little objects that politely match somebody’s couch. I am interested in making work that interrupts the room.

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A lot of my collage work is inspired by hip-hop, not just as music, but as method. Hip-hop taught us that a fragment is not trash just because it was ripped from its original purpose. A sample, a loop, a breakbeat, an old record scratch—put it in the right hands, and it becomes something new. That is how I approach my materials. I take what has been torn, clipped, buried, discarded, misread, or stripped of context and build a new masterpiece out of it.

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Before this current return to visual art, I spent years as a tattoo artist, graffiti writer, and professional chef. Tattooing taught me line, symbolism, permanence, and pain. Graffiti taught me urgency, public language, and how to speak without permission. Cooking taught me discipline, timing, labor, and how to build something people can feel.

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My work is rooted in Black American life, but not as decoration or trauma for sale. I am interested in what gets archived, what gets erased, what gets sanitized, and what keeps surviving anyway.

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At its core, my practice is about memory under pressure.

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What happens when the archive lies? What happens when the official story is too clean? What happens when the fire comes back?

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That is where my work begins.

Not from nostalgia. Not from politeness. Not from permission.

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From the evidence. From the wound. From the songs that raised us. From the walls that taught us how to speak. From the fire that was supposed to be out by now.

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...and wasn’t.