Known for his narrative portraits, Cozart explores the importance of context and symbols in his latest body of work.
by Colony Little | photography by Joshua Steadman

The idea that a small object can hold an abundance of information is woven into artist and educator Steven Cozart’s work. And an unlikely bit of pop-culture lore inspired Codecs/Context, the title of his recent solo show at Anchorlight Gallery. In the origin story of DC Comics’ Superman, the infant superhero is sent to Earth from his planet, Krypton, in a space shuttle. “He’s sent with this tiny device called a codex — in the most recent movie, it looks like a flash drive — that contains all of the information about his home planet,” Cozart says.

Cozart’s narrative portraits are infused with objects and symbols that highlight issues around identity and self-representation. The image of the Superman codex came to him while taking a writing workshop as part of a continuing education course in 2018. Cozart started researching codecs, which are programming algorithms that compress and decompress large data sets or reduce the size of audio or video files for transmission. “I began to see the parallel between this and some of the work I was doing,” he says.

This helped him reframe what he had been creating over the past decade. In The Interview Series from 2013, for example, Cozart created charcoal and pastel portraits using brown paper bags as his canvas. Each drawing features a quote from the subject about their experiences with colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone. In some of these portraits, the subjects are also holding brown paper bags. It’s a reference to a Jim Crow-era practice called the “brown paper bag test,” in which social institutions used the bags as a way to discriminate against individuals with darker skin.

The shade of the bag represented a color line: if one’s skin was lighter than the bag, they had privilege, but if one’s tone was darker, they were denied access to resources, clubs and fraternal organizations that were signifiers of social status.

“Paper bag tests and skin tone are codecs,” Cozart says. “They’re things that carry a lot of information when they’re unpacked.” Much like the way information can be deleted, lost or misinterpreted during the compression and access of data, these codecs reduced individuals to superficial traits and allowed the interpreter to assign their own values to what they “learned.” “If I’m looking at somebody and I’m looking at their skin tone and automatically make these assumptions because they’re lighter or darker, I’m losing information,” Cozart says.

“Context, in my opinion, will offset lost information.” But codecs can also be a way to learn information: seeing the paper bags in his series invites the viewer to learn more about the history of this discrimination and the way it’s still felt in the present day.

Growing up in Durham, Cozart had a penchant for research. “I lived three or four blocks from the main library on Roxboro Street,” he says. He became a regular, burying his head in books about the characters he saw in his older brothers’ comics collection. “They used to have this book about the origins of some of the Marvel characters, including Spider-Man and Fantastic Four,” says Cozart. “I remember checking them out, reading them and comparing those stories to my brothers’ comics.” His brother Johnnie enjoyed making up his own characters to draw his own comics. “I just kind of followed in his footsteps,” says Cozart.

That love for drawing led him to East Carolina University, where he earned a BFA in art education with a concentration in printmaking and drawing. After graduating in the mid-1990s, Cozart moved to Greensboro and started working as an art teacher at Hampton Elementary School, and since 2010 Cozart has taught at the Weaver Academy, one of the state’s top-ranked performing and visual arts schools.

Raleigh artist Isabel Lu was one of his students. “What I admire most about Cozart as an instructor is his humility,” she says. “He is someone who is confident in his ability, but is never resistant to learning from and taking feedback from students and colleagues. I feel incredibly lucky that I can have a continuing relationship with a teacher that helped shape me as a person.”

At Weaver, Cozart’s artistic influence has extended beyond his students. During his first solo show, titled The Pass/Fail Series at the Center for Visual Artists in Greensboro in 2014, he included work from the Interview Series. After seeing the exhibit, students of all disciplines were moved to tell him their own experiences with colorism. “One by one, I had these kids I didn’t even teach coming to find me,” Cozart says.

One young man started coming in regularly, just to vent. “Eventually, I did pieces of him, and one afternoon after school, he dragged his mom down the hallway saying, You’ve got to meet this guy!” Cozart says. The boy’s mother was surprised to learn that her son’s experiences with his identity mirrored her own — the portrait series had created an opening for mother and son to discuss intergenerational issues with colorism and internalized racism in a way they hadn’t before. Since then, Cozart has painted several portraits of her. “I find myself doing multiples of the same person because, you know, a conversation is never a one-and-done,” says Cozart. Some of the portraits from Codecs/Context are currently visible at Ella West Gallery in Durham (through July 19) as part of the Audacity in Motion exhibit.

After 30 years with Guilford County schools, Cozart will retire from teaching at the end of June. “It’s time to make that transition,” he says. He’s looking forward to dedicating more time to his home studio practice, to fleshing out concepts that he explored during the one-year Brightwork Fellowship at Anchorlight that led to Codecs/Context.

For that exhibit, Cozart played with scale, making larger portraits and experimenting with new materials. Conceptually, he examined the negative and positive connotations of codecs by incorporating symbols as affirming gestures in his drawings. In one group of works called The Defiant Ones Series, Cozart embellished portraits of Black men with African Adinkra symbols that characterize the subjects. In another, he explored the idea of texturism — discrimination based on hair texture — in two bodies of work. One incorporates giant yellow #2 pencils in mixed-media installations. Within them, he included portraits of Black men and women with pencils sticking out of their textured, curly or loc’d hair. Arranged as they are, the yellow pencils evoke golden crowns.

But the pencils are another codec: if you stick a pencil in straight hair, it will fall, but tightly coiled or kinky hair will hold it in place. The “pencil test” is a practice attributed to South Africa’s apartheid era, but this sort of discrimination still makes present-day headlines. In 2019 California passed the CROWN Act to protect students’ rights to wear or style their hair without the threat of reprisals, racial discrimination or loss of access to school and extracurricular activities. Since then, 25 states have passed similar laws.

The other series on texturism, called The Divide Series, further examines the politics around straightening hair versus wearing natural hair. In one work created in charcoal, gesso and pencil, two circular portraits of women, one with straight hair and the other with natural hair, are divided by rows of pencils. Cozart’s exploration of texturism was 15 years in the making and was originally inspired by his wife Portia and daughter Rae, who found their decisions to either wear their natural hair or cut their hair short to be fraught with emotion — and the unsolicited opinions of others. “I was looking through those old sketchbooks and found a sketch of my wife from 2011 that I’d labeled, her natural crown,” he says.

“The symbolism of the crown of thorns represents a burden to carry: there are people who are telling you, oh, you shouldn’t treat [straighten] your hair, but if you decide to let it grow naturally, there is another group of people who ask, why are you doing that?’”

Cozart celebrates his wife, Portia, and daughter, Rae, in two recent pieces, Ephemera: The Light (2024) and Ephemera: Rae of Sunshine (2025), in which he depicts each wearing their natural crowns illuminated by a ray of light that resembles a halo. Included are Adinkra symbols, like a butterfly for Rae that represents gentleness and tenderness, and a wooden comb, called a duafe, in Portia’s portrait that’s a symbol of femininity and beauty. Speaking of Portia, Cozart smiles: “If anybody says I’m a good or decent person, it’s because I know her.” 

This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.