Burdock Root is dedicated to the African ancestors who endured profound suffering under the violence of colonialism and slavery. Words cannot fully hold the weight of that history.

The Burdock Root series emerges from a year of research into the documented histories and individual stories of African men, women, and children who were dehumanized, tortured, sexually violated, lynched, and enslaved within systems built and maintained through European colonial expansion and, later, the racial regimes of the United States. The work also engages visual languages such as African masking traditions alongside the violent history of blackface imagery in America.

I do not claim complete understanding of this history. In many ways, the work acknowledges the limits of comprehension in the face of such sustained human brutality.

The paintings titled A man is a man in heaven or hell & Church is where the devil lives draw from archival photographs of Black men living during the Jim Crow era in the United States, a period when legal segregation and racial terror continued to structure everyday life after the formal end of slavery. Encountering the historical records and personal accounts of how Black individuals were treated is difficult even at a distance; the works attempt to sit with that discomfort rather than resolve it.

A poet in the physical (Negro Scars) is a portrait study of raised keloid scars historically documented on the backs of enslaved Africans and African Americans as a result of repeated whippings. The work confronts the body as an archive of violence.

The United Corporation (Flag) is a conceptual flag work. It reflects my personal disalignment with many of the political, economic, and social systems operating within the United States. The piece questions the distance between the nation’s stated ideals and its historical and ongoing realities, while holding space for the country’s unrealized potential.

References and Influences:

Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1984)

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (1962)

Compensation (1999), directed by Zeinabu irene Davis

Isolde (1989), directed by Jytte Rex

Album by David Murray Quartet, Francesca (2024)