“I wanted a seat at a table that didn’t exist, so I helped build the table.” — Bryce Oquaye
Studio Visit: Sequential artist and illustrator Bryce Oquaye
Through his artwork, Oquaye says he works through a central tension: how to claim a home in a place that has committed generations of systemic violence against those who share his identity.
By Delia Rose Gibbs
Contributing Writer
Photos by JD Montgomery (except where noted)
What inspires Bryce Oquaye (oh-KWAY) to create seems infinite: someone he sees walking a hilariously stubborn dog, police brutality, conversations with his kids, women’s reproductive rights (or the lack thereof), memories of his childhood, the current reality of immigrants in the U.S., artists he admires, what he refers to as “the hypocrisy of the American Dream.”
In his studio in the historic, castle-like Loudoun House, Oquaye, a cartoonist, animator and illustrator, offers to draw something on a giant sketchpad while JD Montgomery (Undermain’s photography intern who happens to be a comic and animation enthusiast) and I look on. His black marker squeaks almost continuously, sometimes hovering for a split second while he decides how to convey a facial expression or background texture. When the cartoonist has finished, JD remarks, “Your confidence with a marker scares me.”
Sequential artist and illustrator Bryce Oquaye at work in his Loudoun House studio.
An Origin Story
Oquaye was born in Queens, N.Y. in the late 1980s. His mother, a native of the Bronx with Caribbean roots, perpetually calculated how to protect Bryce and his two younger sisters from the various dangers that accompany being Black and poor. As a result, they moved often. When he peers back into his early life, he finds that his history is time-stamped by interests passed down to him by his mother: comic books and hip-hop music.
Oquaye with his sister in Queens, N.Y., in the early ‘90s; photo taken by his mother.
From a flea market near their cramped apartment, his mom would haul home milk crates stuffed with used comic books. She bought them for the pleasure of it, drawn in as much by the stories as by the low price tags. These were once-prized collections, but by the early 1990s, the comic book market had collapsed and their value had evaporated. For Oquaye, these relics of a boom gone bust were treasures, and by age 3, he wasn’t just fascinated by their pictures — he was teaching himself to read.
Oquaye explains that while the focal point of this piece is him and his sisters, it’s also a piece about his mother, pictured asleep in the background. Her exhaustion and her care formed an invisible shelter that made his childhood often feel joyful and light. “We were dealing with extreme poverty, but we didn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t understand what we were missing. We were just together.”