The Delight Project into Existence

I am sitting at Carson House, looking at my painting titled The Delight Project, KM, and trying to remember what it felt like before I knew what this work would become.

The Delight Project did not begin as a clearly articulated series. It arrived slowly, through resistance, exhaustion, and a deep desire to stop performing a particular kind of courage. For years, I had lived inside conversations about women’s bodies that framed them as something to endure, manage, overcome, or brave. I understood those conversations intimately. I had been braving my body for as long as I could remember.

I developed early. I grew quickly. I was told, explicitly and implicitly, that my body was a problem that needed attention, control, or correction. By the time I was a child, my body already felt public, already felt watched. That sense never fully left me.

A few years ago, my friend, the gifted poet Nicole Callahan, invited me to participate in support of an anthology she was editing called Braving the Body, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The project included writers responding to the theme. As I began preparing my contribution, I felt an unexpected resistance rise up. I realized that I was tired of braving my body. That I had only ever braved it. I was tired of framing the body, my body, as something that must be conquered or survived. I wanted another question.

While at the MET with this incredible group of women, I decided to ask a different question. Not one about this kind of bravery and endurance, but another kind of bravery. About delight.

What about your body brings you delight?

Each woman I asked paused. Some laughed uncomfortably. Some went silent. Not one had an immediate answer. To date, 100% of the women I have asked have never considered the question.

That moment stayed with me. The realization felt heavy and it made me just so sad. How had so many women lived inside their bodies for decades without being asked this question? How had I?

I started painting the moment I got back to Oklahoma.

At first, the project unfolded intuitively. I invited women I knew to participate with me. We had informal conversations about this feeling of being removed from delight. Women whose presence I trusted. We talked casually about their bodies and the places where ease, and maybe joy lived. Sometimes those moments of delight were easy to discover, but not always.

During these conversations,I photographed them. I painted from those images. These early works are so brave and so necessary, and I am so proud of them, but but I somehow knew they were moving me toward something bigger. 

Over time, I understood that The Delight Project was a book. And that this project was to be my work. It also needed more consistent structure than I had given it. The question itself was simple, but the implications were not. Delight, when claimed by women, is not soft. It is radical. It requires turning the lens inward in a culture that insists on constant external appraisal. It also cemented the belief that this project is worthy of doing.

My belief in this project became more demanding, and so I decided to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. As I prepared an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, I needed to articulate what The Delight Project actually was. Not what I hoped it might be, but what it demanded to become. The application process required clarity, discipline, and ambition. It exposed weaknesses in the work. It also revealed its scale. 

I realized the paintings were too small.

I remember thinking about scale and presence, about what it means to encounter a body in paint, not meant for you. How that could be uncomfortable to view in a monumental scale and how they had to be.

The Delight Project was never meant to soothe. It was always meant to confront. To ask viewers to consider how often women’s bodies are consumed without consent, fattened into surface, or interpreted without context.

The Delight Project is 10 monumentally scaled paintings, each paired with a structured interview and an audio archive. In the exhibition space, the viewer would not only see the painted body, but hear the woman speaking in her own voice. Her words would exist alongside her image, inseparable from it.

And so it became The Delight Project: Art + Archive.