THE INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY OF VALERIE CAESAR

Self-portraiture has been at the heart of my work from adolescence, taking many forms — photography, illustration, animation, and video. The Institutional Memory of Valerie Caesar is a documentary collection, featuring selected aspects of my life, and interspersed with short film selections in the style of The Book of Small Black Stories.

These five volumes — My So-Called Quarantined Life (2020), The New Normal (2021), Doodles From the Front Lines (2022), In A Fucking Nutshell (2023), and At This Point (2024) — deliver the truth of my heart’s heart, mundane and unafraid, through video art and poetry. They’re an alchemy of my dry humor, urban angst, omniscient narration, and personal, impish observation, featuring cultural inside jokes and anthropological offerings.

The Institutional Memory of Valerie Caesar is my personal archive; my dear diary; a time capsule of my mind’s eye. They form a variety show gleaned from long meandering Brooklyn walks, cooking explorations, and smoking reveries. Objects of street ephemera become tools of divination; metaphor is meditation — all sublimated through a divinely paired, mellow soundtrack of lo-fi and old school hip hop, jazz and other genres of Black music. It’s a vibe. It’s the world, via my life, shared with you. Find out how you can check it out below.