Kevin Blake grew up on the far south side of Chicago, and while still young bore witness to a unique fraternity of white male power, the Chicago Police Department, where his father and grandfather both enjoyed long, if not fully unblemished, careers. All through his childhood and adolescence he was surrounded, as he remembers, by “constant reminders of how to be a man”. After choosing a very different path for his own life, Blake began studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was motivated by its emphasis of making art that reflected the unique paradoxes of his time and place. It was here too that Blake began the long but painful process of examining the shards of toxic masculinity from his personal history and cultural heritage, to see if they could be reassembled to reflect something more meaningful.