Words Left Unsaid, 2024

Acrylic on canvas, 16” x 24”

Three Fifths???, 2024

Acrylic, photography, blackout poetry, 24” x 18”

The found poem in Three Fifths??? is assembled from fragments of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and reads:

“According to some laws, we partial. Nevertheless, each body is as large as a million million million million miles, the size of the observable universe.”

Set against a collage of photographs from South Central Los Angeles, the text reimagines the relationship between Blackness, scale, and value. The work positions Black life in direct opposition to the historical logic of the Three-Fifths Compromise, which quantified Black bodies as fractions. Drawing on the language of cosmology, the poem proposes an alternative measure: that each Black body contains the magnitude of its own universe.