"Love Your Sons, Raise Your Daughters"

This expresses Elijah Anderson's (author of 'Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community (1990)), where he explores the dynamics of social interaction between police as agents and symbols of mainstream communal efforts to regulate the behavior and social place of black men, and black men in a local community. This give rise to a familiar saying in many black comunities, where black women "love their sons and raise their daughters." According to Michael Eric Dyson, this is a "flawed, attempt to get beyond a theoretical framework that implicitly blames black women for the condition of black men"; whereas James Baldwin, in his last published work, declared it "a disease peculiar to the black community called 'sorriness', where 'Mama," he writes, 'lays this burden on Sister from whom she expects (or indicates she expects) far more than she expects from Brother (who) may never grow up..."

The Black Pieta

This is inspired by "The Pieta" (1499), a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by the renowned artist Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. Where Michelango portrayed a youthful Madonna to symbolize her incorruptible purity, I sought to portray a black mother's painful and fearful dilemma ('Sorriness') on how to enable her black son to flourish as a man, and at the same time, ensure his safety and survival in America.