Heritage Series II

In this series of woodcut prints, I aim to preserve and illuminate the quiet, enduring legacy of Southern Black life through a deeply textural, narrative-driven medium. Each piece operates as a visual record—etched and carved—not only of memory, but of cultural identity, oral tradition, and intergenerational connection. The tactile nature of woodcut printing mirrors the labor, resilience, and repetition that echo through the lives of the subjects portrayed. These works are not romanticized histories; they are meditations on dignity, rootedness, and the subtle power of place.

At its core, this body of work seeks to ask: What remains when the stories of our elders are not written down? Through deliberate mark-making, I trace stories that could have been lost—wedding days, porch gatherings, the rhythm of domestic labor, baptisms, and goodbyes—all moments where the personal and the communal converge. Woodcut, with its unforgiving precision and permanence, becomes the right vehicle for these ancestral transmissions, honoring the grain of lived experience while resisting erasure.


The imagery throughout this collection evokes a profound sense of place—rural homes, porches, fields, and communal interiors—that collectively map the emotional topography of Black Southern heritage. The figures are often faceless, not out of abstraction but as an act of intentional universality. They are everyone. They are ancestors, neighbors, matriarchs, and children.

"Steeples" captures spiritual transformation, placing the figure in a radiant aura—an almost sacred silhouette emerging from labor and land.

"Mama" and "Porch" lean into solitude and reflection, capturing Black womanhood as both sentinel and anchor of the home.

"Communion" and "White Cake" celebrate togetherness—the sacred in the everyday. These are ritualistic spaces: of food, laughter, and storytelling.

"Sun Down" and "Get the Mule" speak to migration and movement, invoking a poetic tension between arrival and departure.

"Wedding Day" and "Rain Wash" elevate domestic life into mythic memory—affirming that everyday Black life is worthy of archival.

"Womens’ Work" and "From the Porch" honor the labor, both visible and invisible, that holds a community together.

"Tall Tales" recalls the oral tradition, placing storytelling at the center of survival and identity.

Throughout the work, contrast becomes metaphor—the interplay between black ink and untouched paper mirrors the tension between memory and forgetting, presence and absence, legacy and silence.