This series reinterprets the visuality of the racialized visual material that weaponized the watermelon. As the caricatures like “Jim Crow” and many others were depicted with watermelon with the purpose to devalue the Black American, I have created this series to further the work of challenging what I call “extension visuals.”

In Diamond Life I, we see the image of a Black male body vertically submerged within a layering of watermelon. The Black man represents both a stance of autonomy and vulnerability as he appears to be supported in some way within the work. He also peers through the fruit very much like the shiny ebony seeds often negotiated while eating the watermelon. He is at once the seed, the fruit and the cultivator of this fruit that was at one time a profitable crop for newly emancipated Black families in America.