Black Madonna - Mancala explores the diasporic connections between game systems, ritual, and cultural memory, tracing links between Mancala’s West African origins and the broader histories of colonial exchange, displacement, and preservation. Mancala, a game of “count and capture,” involves sowing seeds into pits with the strategic goal of accumulation and foresight—its structure reflecting ideas of planning, anticipation, and the cultivation of abundance through logic and calculation.This work considers how systems of play mirror systems of belief and decision-making, connecting Mancala to practices such as casting lots in early biblical texts, including Acts 1:26, where lots were used to determine Matthias as the replacement for Judas. These parallel structures—Mancala, Oware, cleromancy, and divination practices—speak to different cultural approaches to chance, fate, and strategy.Within this framework, the Black Madonna emerges as both spiritual and cultural figure: one associated with protection, liberation, and endurance. She becomes intertwined with ideas of strategy and survival, reflecting how Black women have historically preserved knowledge, culture, and community through systems of care, ritual, and adaptation under colonial conditions.By bringing together game logic, sacred ritual, and diasporic symbolism, the work reflects on how meaning is constructed through systems of movement, choice, and inheritance—both on the board and in lived experience.

As a child, The Jungle Book was one of my favorite movies. As an adult, I find myself pushing for landscapes inspired by conversations surrounding Tropicality, Negritude, and the ways Black and brown people have historically navigated land as both refuge and resistance. This work reflects an ongoing relationship between wilderness, ancestry, and self-determination. The Devil's Shoestring is a root used throughout African American and Native American folk traditions for protection, road opening, and the removal of obstacles. Within this piece, it becomes both a physical object and a metaphor—a reminder that the tools for transformation often exist much closer than we realize. Sometimes they are held together quietly, inherited through memory, family, or faith before we fully understand their purpose.The Devil's Shoestring (Is in Your Pocket) is ultimately about choosing to venture where no one in your family or community has gone before. The future is rarely linear, and growth often requires periods of uncertainty, solitude, and fear. In my experience post undergrad life has these moments when the only way forward is to trust that a path is unfolding beneath your feet, even when it cannot yet be seen. Wisdom is not acquired solely through achievement, but through the balance of inherited knowledge and lived experience. This work is a digital assemblage of scans of trees, leaves, and figures I’ve been drawing since I finished undergrad 2 years ago. Watching it become a full composition forced me to understand that sometimes things must remain unfinished—or even fall apart—until we have the capacity to evolve them with greater intention.The work also honors my ancestors who were Maroons: formerly enslaved Africans who escaped captivity and established self-governed communities throughout the swamps and forests of the American South and the Caribbean. These communities transformed difficult landscapes into places of refuge, resistance, and survival, challenging colonial systems through their intimate knowledge of the land. Although relatively little has been documented about Maroon communities in my home state of South Carolina, their legacy continues to shape my understanding of freedom, kinship, and belonging.Formally, the drawing relies on repetition, contrast, and shifts in value to invite the viewer through a dense visual landscape. While viewing the composition I ask that you scan closely and reveal layered pathways that mirror the work's central theme: that finding one's way is rarely straightforward, but always deeply rooted.