The Price of Eggs

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Artist Statement

I created The Price of Eggs for Film Score Fest, a Minnesota organization that pairs filmmakers and composers to create an original short film in four months or less. As a poet, a poetry film seemed like the best and most cost effective approach for this filmmaker challenge. Time and budget constraints led me to explore whether it was possible to make a meaningful film relying solely on stock material from Envato, a site for creative stock assets. It seemed fitting because of the poem’s commentary on humanity’s relationship to the digital world and my personal practice of seeking sanctuary in the natural world. I was surprised to find an interesting assortment of stock material that makes up the tonal shift in the middle of the piece. The film was screened at Film Score Fest with a live performance of the score by collaborator Khary Jackson in April of 2025, and still feels relevant one year later.

The film includes my narration and voice performances from Khary Jackson, Andie Phillips, and Harper Jolie Goudeau. I’m grateful to Khary Jackson for agreeing to sit down for The Price of Eggs Artist Talk one year after the event. Check out this special presentation as a complement to the film below.

This work is funded in part by MHC with money from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund that was created with the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

Background

“I may spend my whole life looking for sanctuary…”

By the time I answered the open call for Film Score Fest filmmaker teams, my life and my art practice had rocked and buckled under the weight of five years of extraordinary personal and political circumstances. There were the collective experiences related to COVID-19, the unrest and epidemic of police fatal encounters with unarmed citizens that began before, and continued within, the years immediately following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, global wars and climate disasters. In my personal life, proximity to those whose loved ones have been killed by police, and deaths of many of my own family members was an additional layer of grief and trauma.

These experiences were made even more painful after a life altering betrayal by Michigan State University (MSU) that surfaced in 2022 and remains unresolved as of the time of this writing. MSU Press published a low integrity book that contains plagiarism and inaccuracies titled Duffy Daugherty a Man Ahead of His Time, written by a man my family has never met, that uses a photo of my father and his teammates on the cover without their consent. The stepson of the author, a now incarcerated former hedge fund manager, co-wrote a screenplay Black Spartans purportedly based on the MSU Press book that falsely portrays the lives of my parents, their classmates, and MSU administrators in the 1960s. The defamatory screenplay Black Spartans also plagiarized passages from my film Through the Banks of the Red Cedar. The weight of this betrayal, and bearing witness to human rights violations locally and globally during the rise in AI, challenged my sense of safety and belonging in every way imaginable. My comfort with sharing my creative work, and even my personal life, on social media or anywhere was shattered. I began a process of recalibration that allowed me to return to an intentionally local and intimate creative practice.

An ongoing meditation on the idea of sanctuary emerged and was given space through a curation of photography and poetry from my 2017-2024 archive, and new paintings in Sanctuary, a solo exhibition at AICHO Galleries in Duluth, MN, in the summer months of 2024. Much of the work includes flowers and nature, community gatherings and mundane images of day to day life as expressions of resilience. I created a Winter Garden installation as the Change Maker in Residence at Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College in February of 2025, and completed The Price of Eggs during that time. I was additionally honored to deliver the annual Leola Johnson Lecture in Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College which offered a retrospective of the ways that I’ve encountered sanctuary in my multi-disciplinary practice over the past ten years. In 2026, my designs for the exteriors of two Metro Transit bus shelters echo these themes and can be found at Minnetonka Blvd and Highway 100 in St. Louis Park, MN and Nicollet Ave S and 33rd St E in Minneapolis, MN. I am grateful for all of the organizations and communities that have embraced this evolving body work including the Minnesota State Arts Board, Minnesota Humanities Center, American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO), Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship, Film Score Fest, and Metro Transit.