My artwork centers on my African-American lineage, which is traced back to sharecroppers of the American South who migrated to Northern cities along the East Coast. My pictorial narratives are personal, yet the symbols I use are universal and interplay with larger social, racial, ancestral, economic, and political histories that inform our nation to this day. The history of my family is the history of black Americans, which is the history of all of North America.

In my works, I often combine acrylic paint with an array of found, made, and purchased papers. The materials I use are conceptual statements on this legacy of an often-overlooked portion of society that made something out of nothing.

Both my representational and abstract works incorporate a variety of symbols, patterns, and marks to create powerful images filled with the rhythmic properties of music that weave throughout my oeuvre. Born in a generation infused by soul and R&B music, I grew up hearing rap music that freely sampled the music of my childhood, mixing and recomposing these songs to create rhythms befitting to hip hop music. In my work, my natural instinct is to paint and collage on the same surface, applying the same spontaneity of hip hop deejays and the resourcefulness of rural quilters, who use what is at hand, assembling, collaging, and creating.

While made of the energy of contemporary culture, my work is also influenced by Abstract Expressionism and draws from the soulfulness of the quilts from the women of Gee’s Bend. For me, there is a visual rhythm to layering these antipodes: found versus purchased objects, figures versus abstract, paint versus paper, busy versus quiet.

My work aims to imbue each piece with a lyrical yet authentic resilience borne of limited resources and frugality that speaks to the struggle and hope, pain, joy, and soul of folks in the black community.

ransome was born in the small town of Rich Square, NC, moved to New Jersey as a teenager, and now resides in the Hudson Valley region of New York. He received an MFA from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA and a BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Through collage, painting, sculpture, installation, and video, ransome’s work comments on his family’s life in America from 1899, the year his grandmother was born, to our current times. At the core of his practice is a reflection on the Great Migration, the period in American history when six million Black people left the south and migrated north and west in search of a better life. While his pictorial narratives are personal, the images in his work are universal and interplay with larger social, racial, ancestral, economic, and political histories that inform our nation to this day.

ransome’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Opalka Gallery, Albany, NY; the Contemporary art Museum (CAM), Raleigh, NC; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Woodstock Artist Association & Museum, Woodstock, NY; and Geary, Millerton, NY. Group shows include the 2023 Center for Maine Contemporary Art Biennial, Rockland, ME; An Unpredictable Time & Place, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; 47th Presentation of Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC; as well as exhibitions at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; Band of Vices, Los Angeles, CA, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; The Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY; and the Katonah Museum, Katonah, NY. ransome was a 2022 Pollock-Krasner foundation grantee and was awarded the 2022 Hudson Valley Artist Purchase Award from The Dorsky Museum. He was recently awarded a Silver Medal in the Innovation category from Contemporary Collage Magazine. He participated in residencies at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Studios of Key West; Key West, FL; and will be an artist-in-residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY in January 2025. ransome’s work is in the collection of The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; The Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY; University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH; and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ. He is represented by Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA. In addition, ransome is curating the upcoming exhibition Hudson Valley Artists 2025: Movement at The Dorsky Museum, opening in February 2025.