Artist Statement
This work holds presence as a responsibility and a truth. It names the Black body as fixed within the landscape, as fact. Set within the visual language of the American West, these figures occupy a space shaped by exclusion and mythmaking. Their placement asserts Black presence as enduring and rightful, woven into the land itself. The scale carries the weight of memory and inheritance, a history that lives in the ground. These bodies remain. Their presence is claimed through being.
The stillness of these faces carries sacred gravity. Survival is deliberate and sustained through self-knowledge and care. Identity stands as sovereign ground, complete and self-defining. By reclaiming Western iconography, the work affirms the importance of diversity by expanding who is seen, remembered, and recognized as belonging. It speaks to the discipline of standing in one’s own knowing, rooted in lineage that continues to breathe and endure.