What’s on Uncle Sam’s 1776 Wish List?, 2026
Acrylic, gravel, dirt, leaves, and canvas
“He has: People,
Laws,
Governments,
States,
Rights,
Power,
War,
Justice?”
This found poem is composed entirely of the ten most frequently repeated words in the Declaration of Independence, arranged in order from most to least appearances. Removed from their original context, the words expose the document’s underlying architecture: possession, authority, domination. “He” is the most repeated word: a reminder that the nation’s founding imagination was shaped through the lens of patriarchy.
At the bottom of the piece, the word “Justice” is obscured beneath layers of acrylic. Its burial asks whether justice can ever be fully realized in a nation still governed by documents written during an era of Black & Indigenous enslavement.
Stills from If I Awaken in Los Angeles, 2025
Multi-media live performance
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.
