Malcolm Peacock Asks, “When Is the Last Time You Trusted Yourself?”

Through his largely—but not exclusively—performance-based practice, Peacock invites audience members to partake in trust-building and resource-gathering, challenging the current societal climate where such tendencies have become increasingly fraught and restrained. “Trust can be a basis for building confidence. When amid difficulty, if you trust yourself, you have a compass of confidence for navigating because you trust in yourself,” he shared during our interview in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. Guided by this generous philosophy, Peacock proposes a compass for resurrecting what once was and demonstrating what can be—a reverent faith in oneself and an ethos of service for the growth and development of others.

I first met Peacock in the gallery of his two-person exhibition with Shala Miller at Artists Space in May of 2023. Throughout the show, Peacock generated one-on-one meetings with audience members. Whoever signed up participated in hour-long breathing exercises and listened to Peacock’s invocations of individuals’ names that were submitted through requests for prayers. He had invited me to join a holding space and potluck (which was not organized by Artists Space staff), where folks who gathered would “intentionally listen to a list of special songs” inspired by Peacock’s repetitive watching of Whitney Houston’s 1985 performance of “You Give Good Love” on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as well as a reflection on “the wild impacts of Black music on Black folks’ lives across time.” Many of us met for the first time in the dimly lit gallery; there, we divulged personal stories relating to our backgrounds in the arts, periodically interrupting ourselves with praise for the delicious food. Somewhere between a dinner table conversation, listening party, and conference, the sensory-filled event choreographed intimate exchanges among strangers, demonstrating the potency of trusting others and fostering security inside of the unknown.

Such social practice and “trust falls” feature heavily in Peacock’s practice. As a skilled runner (he completed multiple marathons and is currently preparing for the 2024 California International—the fastest course in the western United States), Peacock was initially enthralled by cross-country running as a silent social activity. For the artist, running long distances in the presence of others affords the possibility for all involved, including oneself, to persevere amid difficulty. “I want to change and believe in change, even if only slightly. If I can see a shade deeper than before, I [think I have] gleaned something,” Peacock explains. Similarly, hair braiding presents opportunities for shared memories between braiders and sitters, and cathartic epiphanies for the latter through the agony of persistent hair-pulling required to plait synthetic Kanekalon hair. Peacock refers to his braided works as “textured confessions,” a tangible medium that requires “testing of the self and endurance” and embodies a portrait of togetherness, of tending to, holding, and being thoughtfully selfless toward another person. Resembling natural forms—flora, terra firma, the sun, and human figures—Peacock’s braided sculptures in many ways indicate the fortified strength and interconnectedness of all things.

Born near Raleigh, North Carolina, Peacock grew up primarily in and around Baltimore, Maryland. As one of five children, Peacock has always understood his role in service to a group. When he was four, Peacock’s mother already knew of her son’s artistic talent. With clarity and precision, Peacock recounts a story in which his aunt requested that he draw a cat, not yet aware of Peacock’s drafting prowess. After disappearing for a while into his room, Peacock emerged with a beautiful image that was met by his aunt’s agape mouth. “I know. I told you, he’s really good,” his mother affirmed. Both of Peacock’s parents carried out professions in subjects they thoroughly enjoyed—his father worked as an engineer and his mother as a beautician. With their professional contentment in mind, a young Peacock envisioned his future as a working artist, not yet realizing how his parents’ careers would manifest within his artistic practice through works such as Next in line at the top of the valley, his spine bent forward as he surrendered to his choices (2023), which demonstrates Peacock’s meticulous hair braiding (a technique learned from his mother) to achieve geometry and color gradience (a craft aligned with his father).

Peacock showed an early aptitude for creative pursuits, supported in full by his mother and father (who laminated every drawing). Around seven or eight, Peacock’s mother noticed a decline in his drawing cadence, which she attributed to a presumed unstable or weary mental health in her son. She confronted him about the matter, and for the first time, Peacock realized that his drawing practice not only served as a mere hobby but as a necessary and repetitive occupation that rewarded those around him. In choosing to create, Peacock fulfilled a specific purpose that contributed to and sustained his unit. When he told me this story, I was immediately reminded of the wisdom of Sobonfu Somé in The Spirit of Intimacy: “The goal of the community is to make sure that each member of the community is heard and is properly giving the gifts he has brought to this world. Without this giving, the community dies. And without the community, the individual is left without a place where he can contribute.”1 Moreover, Peacock’s awareness of art as a bastion for collective wellbeing may explain his artistic tendency to catalyze group interactions and develop comfort inside of risk through physical action—running, offering, convening, conversing, performing, braiding, and looking.

Peacock’s education, beginning in middle school and stretching into graduate studies, principally remained within predominantly white institutions. Ambitious and inquisitive to say the least, Peacock connected his current experience with the historical legacy of racial inequity in school systems. Albeit racially integrated, Peacock’s learning environment—replete with culturally unaware peers and their inherent ethnic and cultural biases—contributed to the artist’s transformational voyage toward self-understanding and self-allegiance. I can envision this transition as an awakening to a particular type of consciousness, that is, an invocation of the Du Boisian conception of double consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”2

Within months of enrolling as an undergraduate student in the Art Department of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Peacock’s father passed away, and later, the artist himself experienced a health crisis with grave repercussions. Using his body as a vehicle in which to process grief, purge bodily disconnection, and commune with others, Peacock began to “perform” in the presence of his fellow students, teachers, and the broader Richmond community—conducted away from VCU’s campus. “I thought, well, I’m really close to dying, I don’t have any other option. So, if I’m at the edge, I might as well go all the way to the edge,” Peacock recalls about this existential leap into performance. Alongside such intense engagements with trauma, Peacock became close to artist Arnold Joseph Kemp (then Associate Professor and Chair of the Painting and Printmaking Department), whom he observed moving gracefully through predominantly white spaces as a Black queer person, thus reminding Peacock of his capacity to exist in full authenticity.

In Richmond, Peacock recognized the difference between audience and sentiment, the former equating to whoever showed up, and the latter being understood as who the work was for. Stemming from experiences of isolation, Peacock’s practice makes room for intimacy and trust among Black people. Audiences participate in his socially engaged works by invitation (as with the Artists Space potluck) or through signing up to run with, be spoken to, or, in the case of Peacock’s Prospect.5 commission We Served … and they felt tiny bursts along the horizon (2021), to be fed by the artist himself. Risk is undoubtedly at the heart of these vulnerable engagements. However, above all, Peacock trusts in himself, enabling him to experience and foster profound connections with others. His mother’s proclamation, “Trust yourself. You are the best judge of yourself,” which she wrote in a high school graduation letter that he kept in his studio at Studio Museum 127, illuminates the root of Peacock’s reverent self-trust.

In graduate school at Rutgers University, a space where Peacock felt a “structured, performed, artistic expectation,” he nevertheless encountered a generous community of artists such as Sharon Hayes, EJ Hill, Park McArthur, Monique Mouton, and Cameron Rowland, to name a few, as well as off-campus institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem. His creative interlocutors, many of whom were achieving great support within the art world, reiterated his mother’s wise sentiments pertaining to self-determination. Mindful of Peacock’s running routine, I ask if certain learned attitudes and principles for completing long distances contributed to assembling trust and self-confidence. Interestingly, his response shifted our conversation to his artistic process preparing for Pass Carry Hold: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2023–24 (September 26, 2024–February 2025). “For me, right now, my studio practice is more physically difficult than my running,” Peacock says, going on to explain that enlarging the scale of his braided work has precipitated feelings akin to the hardest moments in a race: “It’s the creeping of doubt or negativity when it’s at the size of a raisin, and doing everything you have to squash it immediately.” Nonetheless, Peacock forges on, trusting in himself and committing to perpetually eradicating “the raisin.”

In preparation for the exhibition, Peacock embarked on a marathon-like braiding endeavor of weaving countless strands of Kanekalon hair to form a tree, his largest hair sculpture to date. When encountering the finished piece in PS1’s gallery, viewers may wonder about the endurance, persistence, and time required to assemble this laborious structure. How often did Peacock choose trust over doubt? Can one access pleasure and imagination in a space of uncertainty? In committing to this indescribable and immeasurable feat, Peacock, settling down against the park’s freshly cut grass, brings our conversation to a close: “Every moment is a critical moment in an art practice, but I feel like my work and I are making more agency for my movement in life than I’ve ever made before. All of my choices are options and not dreams, or not necessarily far off. Things don’t feel as mythic, they feel like possibilities that can be attended to.”