says. “I was lighter skinned, and was considered very rich
even though I wasn’t. It was difficult to go anywhere.” After
getting in fights at the public school he was attending,
Sue-Pat was shipped off to a “posh school,” he says, which
opened his mind to possibilities away from home.
He later attended the Edna Manley School of Art in
Jamaica, which, he says, finally solidified in his mind that
making art was what he wanted to do. Where that was
going to happen, though, was still up in the air. That is,
until he was forced to leave his home. “I had to run,” Sue-
Pat says about his sudden departure from the place where
he had grown up. “I had some issues in Jamaica that made
me flee literally in the middle of the night.” He tried to get
to London, where he would later briefly live, but couldn’t
afford the ticket. Because one of his sisters lived in Miami,
he decided to go there and stay with her for a while. “But I
really wanted to go to New York,” he adds.
Soon enough he would get here. Crashing with his godparents
-- who happened to be connoisseurs of Art Nouveau,
Arts and Crafts, and WPA art and own a gallery in
the West Village -- was his introduction to the city’s art
world. He ended up living with them for almost six years.
Their influence can be seen directly in one of the house’s
rooms, which serves, in a way, as a tribute to their interests.
Many of the objects from their home that Sue-Pat
inherited after they passed away reside here. “They were
gracious to take me in and show me a different world,”
Sue-Pat says of his godparents. “That was my first real
New York experience.”
Moving to Bed Stuy helped solidify his artistic practice.
“For a long time, I thought, ‘Am I a painter? Am I a sculptor?’
It turns out I’m everything,” he says. “I learned to
embrace it all. I don’t want to fight it. I just want to create.”
In both work and life, creativity is at the forefront for
Sue-Pat. And to bring that creativity forward, he needed
to find a place that matched his new conception of
home. When he first looked at the row house, a fire had
destroyed large parts of the interior. A lot of work needed
to be done. “It was empty; there was nothing here,”
Sue-Pat says. “I had the feeling that it needed somebody
to love it.” He immediately began to see it like a canvas,
where his creative impulses could run free. And when he
peered through the boarded-up back windows, he noticed
the lush backyard. It had elements of the natural world,
which reminded him of his childhood and also presented
new opportunities to express himself. Home was not just
something new but the accumulation of life’s experiences
up to that point.
It was a long journey to this moment. Sue-Pat first became
interested in art as a child in Jamaica. His mother tells a
story about how he once, at around the age of 10, removed
all the furniture from his bedroom and replaced it with
rocks. It was his first sculptural installation. Later, inspired
by his grandmother, he started making little objects
and selling them at a local market with his grandmother,
who made flowers. But the atmosphere in Jamaica at that
time made the impossibility of exploring an artistic life
nearly impossible. “I stood out, I was an odd fit,” Sue-Pat
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An efficient gray and white kitchen provides a neutral background for the art.