By Constance Jaquay Strickland
For over a decade, I have carved out a path as an artist outside the confines of predominantly white institutions, white power, white leadership, and colonized spaces. I didn’t adjust myself to fit into a reality that was inorganic to finding my voice; for that reason, I have existed as an outlier. As an artist, I’ve only ever wanted to make honest work, push perception, and honor the trajectory of my ideas. I never believed white validation was the only path to legitimacy. I’ve never needed anyone to name me. I have named myself.
Viola Davis recently spoke about her time at Juilliard, where she was trained to be a “perfect white actress” but wasn’t prepared for the roles she would be offered as a Black woman. She articulated how this training created a profound disconnect between her education and professional opportunities. While at Juilliard, she was tasked with proving her range through exclusively white work, yet upon graduation, she found herself primarily considered for Black roles—roles for which she was sometimes deemed “not Black enough.” This contradiction left her in what she described as a “quagmire,” struggling to understand how to authentically use herself as the canvas for her art. Her story resonated deeply with me—not because I shared that particular journey, but because I actively chose a different one. While she navigated the overwhelming white gaze of elite training, I stepped away from the university pipeline entirely.
I never transferred from community college to a university due to financial reasons, and I did not want to continue a path into a predominantly white institution after a disturbing experience I had during theatre school. I discovered I could not risk continuing on a path that would have trained me to be “perfect” by their standards. Instead, I stayed in the trenches. I fought my way through unknown spaces that didn’t center whiteness as the ideal, and in doing so, I found myself. I found my voice—not the one that institutions try to sand down, but one that is whole, complex, and rooted in ancestral memory.
Yes, that decision isolated me. It is the origin point of my refusal to be named, shaped, or reduced. It made the road harder, longer, perhaps even less defined. Yet, that solitude gave me the room to experiment, to bend genres, to reimagine what theatre could be, not what I was taught it to be. I have always had a strong presence, a voice that can come off as too strong, too aggressive, too loud, too much. Outside of the confines of white academia, I was allowed to be all those things without apology. And in being “too much,” I became whole.
As stated, my journey has not been without trauma, but I do not write it as pity or sensationalism. It has been a source of energy and fuel. I think back to my time at LACC, where a classmate was experiencing domestic abuse, and when I stood up in defense of her, I was labeled the aggressor. The man I stood against, a white male, was upheld by faculty, given an opportunity to work on and off campus under the mentorship of a respected teacher. He would later bring a gun onto campus, locking down the entire theatre program. During this time, I learned the brutal truth of how white male violence is upheld, white femininity is protected, and how easily Black women are vilified when they speak up. I took what I felt was a horrible injustice to the district school board, and I won.
Of course, as things go, I was invited back into the program to attend the Kennedy Center Theatre Festival and was able to complete my program on my terms. This emotional and wild period, I learned what radical support could look like—what true allyship is, how people show up for you, and who shows up for you when it matters. That was a turning point. That was when I began to understand how faith and resilience begin to carry you forward even through hard times.
I now understand that this so-called detour was the path and not just a detour—but a design. My not transferring to a university was a spiritual redirection. My refusal to mold myself into the image of what white institutions deemed worthy was an act of preservation—and rebellion. It gave me my life’s work. It gave me back to myself. It also revealed the cost of allyship, the danger of speaking truth in spaces that reward silence, and the violent consequences of white institutional negligence.
I think of Tonya Pinkins’ 2020 article, Why I’m Fed Up with Performative Activism from White and Black Theatremakers. I was late in noticing that this occurs on many levels in many ways from Black and white theatremakers. I never wanted to be in a gang, tribe, or club that excluded others or left others behind. I became an artist for that exact opposite reason. Yet, I’ve seen bullies exist on both sides of the race card. I’ve seen gatekeepers. I’ve seen white people who produce Black artists feel as though they are making change, but rather, they are still upholding a colonized system. I’ve seen Black people just be happy to be seen and acknowledged by PWIs or white people that they walk in exclusion and delusion.
To believe in the unseen. To make energy visible. To trust that invisible forces reveal themselves in tangible ways. I know this as faith. Faith from loved ones. Faith in oneself. This, to me, is hope. Faith in my ancestors. Faith in those who offered small yeses, unexpected support, or quiet encouragement when I needed it most to push through and continue in the work.
Recent and past experiences have stretched me as an artist—some lessons hard, all necessary. I’ve had to piece myself back together and keep moving forward. Most importantly, I’ve come to never ask for anything I couldn’t imagine first. The first ten years, I sustained my practice through the support of my partner, my family, and odd gigs. I remained untethered to academic institutions, moving instead through intuition, will, and lineage. Over time, I found—if not a tribe—a constellation. Artists working beyond a category. Collaborators creating on a high frequency that feels ancestral, cellular, infinite.
I know for sure that anything is possible. I know that the well runs deep. I know that I make work because I have to, and I love it, and I would do it with no funding, no support, and alone. However, over the last two years, I have been blessed to slowly receive funding that allows the work to live longer. Yet, before there was even a glimmer of support, I was creating work. These days, I carry joy, hope, fear, rage, and devotion in equal measure. These are my source materials. The work is my inheritance.
This year, as I step into new chapters as an independent artist running a small experimental theatre company: a two-week residency with the Six Viewpoints Institute at Salisbury University working on my new solo, A Study on the Weight of Blackness (Unveils) The Resilience of Being Black, which will continue for anther two weeks at BASE in Seattle, a special performance of mercy: An Ode to Black Women’s Labor supported by WEHO Arts and New York’s Arts Outside is a reminder that work we start may not always live how we expect it to and finally the season will end with a month-long writing residency in Genoa, Italy, where I’ll be assembling my first collection of physical plays, or “pocket plays.” This path has allowed me to expand upon my voice in an authentic way I never expected but always imagined. For that, I thank the ancestors.
I write this twelve years in, closer than ever to naming myself. Right now, as a transdisciplinary artist, my voice feels clearer and stronger. A voice that refuses capture. A body in motion. This road has never been easy—but it’s mine. And that, too, is power.
“To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves. For some of us this will not be easy. So long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look. Nevertheless, we can’t theorize in a void, we must have evidence. And we—I speak only for black women here—have barely begun to articulate our life experience . . . It is slow and it is painful. For at the end of every path we take, we find a body that is always already colonized.”
~Lorraine O’ Grady
