Jeary “Sylves” Payne (Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-disciplinary artist and visual storyteller. He works full time as an Associate Educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and will pursue a Masters of Art in Oral History at Columbia University in the coming fall. "Who will tell the stories after us?" Is a question that serves as a guiding principle for his work. Payne is inspired to document scenes that represent nuance, micro moments of Black life and experiences of real people with an aim to extablish them into the canon of visual culture.