DS Kinsel

DS Kinsel is an award-winning creative entrepreneur and cultural agitator who expresses his creativity through various mediums, including painting, printmaking, collage, and curating. His work focuses on themes of space keeping, urban tradition, mortality, and cultural re-appropriation. DS is former AmeriCorps Public Ally member and an Awardee of the Pittsburgh Courier Fab 40, Pittsburgh Magazine PUMP 40 Under 40, Pgh Tech Council Creative of The Year. He has served as a board member of the Pittsburgh Center for Creative REuse, PearlArts, Black Transformative Arts Network, and Shady Lane School, and currently serves on the advisory board for Artists Communities Alliance.

The site specific text based collage essays by DS Kinsel are created by colliding narrative, practice, and time. Inspired by traditional hip hop cultural practices - each work samples intensity, volume, and pattern from surrounding sources of influence to transform these elements into a series of collage essays. The artifacts present a series of collage essays around identifiable topics such as authoritarian oppression, graffiti, eroticism, legacy, ancestors, mortality, liberatory practice, and love.