They left us out of the frame for five hundred years. I put us back in it, crown first.
Kenneth Bussey works as AWA$ between Santo Domingo and Salvador da Bahia. The work pulls from Kongo and Yoruba cosmology, jazz rooms, barbershops and Sunday mornings.
AWA$ directs. The machine renders. The meaning is his.
Every piece is a digital work, made with AI generation and digital painting tools under his direction, styled after oil and mixed media. Every piece starts with something real: an orisha, a saint, a barbershop chair, a Sunday morning, a man at the grill. From there it is direction. Composition, color, symbol, the angle of a crown, the weight of a gaze. Version after version until the image carries what it was meant to carry. Most versions never leave the studio. The ones that reach this wall are the ones that said something back.
Prints are made to order on archival paper by a professional print partner close to you, so nothing sits in a warehouse.