Machine exhibitions:
Capt. James Stovall V was born and raised in Altadena, California. He is a self-taught artist, husband, father, and former rock-paper-scissors champion. Stovall’s early interest in art led him to the Art Institute of Philadelphia to study advertising before transferring to the San Diego campus, where he eventually left school to pursue his practice independently.Stovall’s free-flowing approach centers the joy of making, using lived experience and collective history as catalysts for disrupting the preciousness of traditional forms. Working across painting, drawing, murals, sculpture, installation, performance, and sound, he moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, often questioning the boundaries between drawing and painting, finished and unfinished.
His work is rooted in an ongoing investigation of memory, identity, belief, grief, and the forces that shape how we understand ourselves and one another. More recently, he has expanded into theatrical sculpture and sound, creating immersive environments that allow his ideas to exist beyond the canvas.
Stovall has created live performances and murals and exhibited in solo and group exhibitions. His residency experience includes The Watermill Center, NXTHVN, Rokeby Lab at the Rokeby Museum, AB180, and Arts Letters & Numbers.
Artist Statement
My practice is shaped by the belief that being human is an unfinished, continually shifting process. I work through this sense of incompleteness by creating images that exist between the resolved and unresolved: covered faces, half-finished portraits, obscured figures, and interruptions that withhold clarity. In this sense, the work reflects something of the plight of Blackness in America, a continual negotiation between visibility and erasure, self-definition and imposed identity, presence and absence. These gestures allow abstraction and figuration to coexist, fracture form, and leave space for interpretation. They are acts of unlearning and relearning—ways of reckoning with personal experience while confronting the world as it exists, both historically and in the present.
The work moves between the assumptive, the joyful, the satirical, the comical, and the grief-fueled. I remain interested in emotional charge as a means of giving form to what often stays buried. Rather than offering fixed narratives, each piece becomes a site of tension: a place to reflect on the past, remain grounded in the present, and speculate about what might come next.
The paintings operate as battlegrounds for a dream state, a kind of playground philosophy where memory collides with imagination and abstraction and figuration intertwine. Religious iconography appears alongside newspapers, magazines, and mass-produced imagery—materials rooted in belief, repetition, circulation, and collective memory. Through layered paint, line, text, and mark-making, these sources are transformed into surfaces that feel simultaneously intimate and recognizable.
By placing these elements in proximity, I explore how belief systems, cultural narratives, and personal mythologies shape identity, perception, and self-understanding. The masks, erased figures, and the unknown that recur throughout the work function less as disguises than as evidence: markers of what is protected, withheld, inherited, or shaped by external pressures over time.
What emerges is a practice committed to questioning meaning, inheritance, and identity while resisting resolution. I embrace contradiction and ambiguity as necessary conditions of becoming. The work remains personal while creating space for questions that extend beyond self.