This Crown: How I Wear It
A growing archive of textured hair and the people who style it.
Ongoing series, Aug 2026–present
Project StatementGetting your hair done takes hours. You sit, someone works behind you, and the room fills up with talk while you wait. By the end you stand up looking like someone new.
This Crown is a growing archive of textured hair and the people who style it. Patricia photographs braiders, locticians, and barbers across Minnesota, each in the styles they know best, and takes the project with her wherever she travels next.
The photographs follow the whole sitting: hands parting and braiding and cutting, the person in the chair as the hours pass, everyone else waiting their turn, and the talk that runs through all of it. At the end, the finished style is photographed from the back like sculpture, then in profile, then from the front.
Everyone says in their own words how they wear their hair, who does it for them, and what it means to them. Every stylist is named beside the work they made.
The way each sitting is photographed stays the same wherever the project goes, so a chair in Minnesota and a chair anywhere else belong to the same archive. What shifts is the people, the place, and the color that place brings with it.
An ongoing series. Chapter one: Minnesota.
About This ProjectThe idea started in the chair. Hours pass while someone works behind you, and everything that happens in that time, the waiting, the talk, the trust it takes to hand your head to someone, never shows up in a photograph of the finished style.
This Crown photographs both. Every sitting is documented the same way wherever it happens: the work as it goes, the room around it, and the finished style from the back, in profile, and from the front. That consistency is what lets a chair in Minnesota sit beside a chair anywhere else and belong to the same archive.
The approach takes its cue from J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, who spent decades photographing Nigerian hairstyles from behind and treated each one as a form worth recording. This Crown carries that forward and adds voices to it. Everyone speaks for themselves about how they wear their hair, who does it for them, and what it means, and every stylist is credited beside the work they made.
Medium: Photography and audio
Location: Minnesota, and wherever the project travels
Status: Ongoing, chapter one in progress
Support: by the African Museum Arts & Cultural Center (AMACC) and African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS)