My Story
Yohance Lacour is an artist, a journalist, and an activist.
I came of age on Chicago’s Southside, long before the advent of social media, and my work naturally evolved my purpose as a custodian of the age-old tradition of Black storytelling. As a kid, I fashioned myself a writer and cartoonist, as I imagined worlds for my own comic books. I took up the art of poetry in my pre-teens and progressed into writing raps as a teenager.
In the 80s, I spent my summers in Harlem with my uncle, a civil rights attorney whose example would allow me, for the first time, to witness entrepreneurialism and resistance in real time. Those formative summers in the Big Apple acquainted me with another dynamic that would become a defining part of my life and craft -- Hip Hop, where Black and Brown youth living in poverty were able to embrace struggle, while simultaneously aspiring to enjoy luxuries afforded exclusively to the other side of the class spectrum. As fate would have it, that aspiration eventually led me to my darkest moments and my saving grace.
In the 90s, I was selling drugs, going to school, embarking on what has now become a heralded career as a guerrilla journalist, and writing, acting and producing for a theater company I co-founded. Even while compromising my own values, I still couldn’t escape the urge to tell Black stories. In 2008, I was sentenced to a decade in federal prison, where I cultivated a new storytelling medium… leathercraft.
Today, in addition to my work with the Invisible Institute’s Audio Team and Wrongful Conviction Unit, my handmade leather works tell stories of their own; of redemption, Black joy and pain. They speak not only to the Black experience as I've come to know it, but the future I hope to mold.
An extension of my personal journey, my work is heavily influenced by everything from the Black church to the Black Panther Party, and everyone from my parents (both products of Jim Crow’s deep south) to the gang members that characterized life on the South Side during the 80s and 90s. Hip Hop’s golden era wasn’t the only force to shape my worldview. Chicago’s Harold Washington years redefined Black political power, while Reagan’s America unleashed a crack epidemic whose impact still reverberates today.
Together, these forces form the tightrope that I still walk… trying to strike a comfortable balance between American capitalism and Black nationalism. Similar to the Black street organizations I came of age in, whose only blueprints were the Italian and Irish mobs that oppressed them, I've also embraced the pursuit of luxury goods and status symbols, while rejecting the notion that they can only be garnered through the European traditions that represented the oppression I am passionate about eradicating.
I was raised in a global city with grassroots… one that is both world-class and working-class. And this is the essence of the struggle behind the stories I tell, and the art that I craft. We will forever be influenced by that from which we come, for we are only as original as our origins. Power.