The groundings series is inspired by Walter Rodney’s “Groundings with my Brothers.” This work provokes the possibilities of what an actual grounding with three specific examples of Black manhood. The headshot imagery of these men are slightly obstructed by rows of stars like the signification of the states represented in the American flag. Within the composition of this series the stars are both small state like obstructions set on a path of horizontal lines mimicking the national like obstructions of the stripes.

In this piece I have placed Frederick Douglass a Black American Man who experienced both the horrors of enslavement and the challenges of being a “free” man who is Black. In his lifetime Douglass felt the shifts of emancipation, reconstruction and the beginnings of Jim Crow. He is presented with W.E.B Du Bois was a Black man who worked towards many accomplishments while living through reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. He graduated from Harvard University and worked through being in spaces that were often created for the development of White male intellectualism. Then we have Frantz Fanon a child of the French Caribbean but a man of the African diaspora.