Black Angel

When I first had the idea for the Black Angel I thought of the phrase "Out of many, one" or, in the original Latin, E pluribus unum. What the phrase came to mean for me was the singularity of one love. I wanted to give it form through the wings of an angel.

My early thinking was that I wanted to engrave into the sticks the names of the enslaved people who lost their lives during one of the most devastating chapters of American history. But those names have been erased. This piece attempts to hold their presence. A strength and remembrance, held in the same figure.

The Angel is built from more than four thousand individual sticks: seven distinct designs, each cut to its own custom angle, each assigned to its own region of the composition. Each stick stands on its own, and each was meant to carry the story of a life to be, a life that was never allowed to unfold the way it should have. And so each stick stands strong as a feather of the wing. Together, they become wings.

I have always wanted to protest that past, and to stand with any group of people who are held down today. But I often haven't known how to get the emotion I carry inside of me out into the world. I don't always know the right way to do it. So I decided to make a piece of art that would express it.

In 1776, it was an artist who proposed E pluribus unum to the committee of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, and the phrase made it onto the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. A promise of unity adopted by a nation that, at that very same moment, held people in slavery and excluded them from the "one." In a sense, this Black Angel insists on completing the promise of that phrase.

Sometimes, I like to think of this piece as embodying a kind of spiritual reverb, an echo for humanity that keeps sounding, radiating outwards off the wall. If remembering loudly offers anything positive for future generations, let this be my loud.

Making this work allowed me to put something into the world that means something to me. My hope is that it means something to others, too. That it invites each of us to find our own way to speak the language of love, to practice remembrance and grow from our history.