The Shreveport Son, 2026
Acrylic, gold leaf, and paper collage on canvas
On the Title
The Shreveport Sun was the newspaper of my hometown, and for decades it served as a record of Black life in Shreveport. It carried some local news, but its real subject was the church: church anniversaries, pastor anniversaries, First Lady anniversaries, revivals, and weddings. In its pages, people who were overlooked everywhere else were celebrated, dressed in their best, and photographed with care. Those photographs were the best I have ever seen, and they taught me early that an image can be an act of honor.
The Shreveport Son shifts one letter. The sun becomes a son, a native son, a child of the city carrying its history with him. It is a portrait of belonging, and of what belonging costs.
The Figures
Two figures stand side by side against a field of red and orange, posed with the stillness of a formal portrait, as if waiting for the Sun's photographer. Their faces are simplified, their eyes wide and steady, their expressions neither joyful nor grieving. They are present, and they are watching. The flat, bold color of their bodies holds firm against the moving, textured ground behind them, the way people hold their ground against the forces that shape a place.
Red
The red dress carries three histories. The first is the Red River, which gave the city its life; Shreveport takes its name from Henry Shreve, who cleared the river's Great Raft and opened the region to trade, including the cotton economy built on enslaved labor. The second is the red-light district, which the city placed alongside Black neighborhoods. The third is the red line: redlining, the maps that marked Black communities as hazardous and locked them out of investment for generations.
Across the dress runs a flock of shotgun houses. The shotgun house traces its lineage through Haiti back to West Africa, and it became the architecture of Black Southern neighborhoods. On the dress, the houses move like birds, a community both rooted and in motion, both home and the thing redlining tried to contain.
Yellow
The yellow shirt recalls the yellow fever epidemic of 1873, one of the deadliest in the South, which emptied Shreveport and took hundreds of lives. The color of sickness is worn here as the color of the sun, bright and unbowed, bearing the newspaper's name like an emblem. It echoes in her yellow glasses, a lens through which history is seen.
Gold
The figure wears a gold tooth. In Shreveport, many people have at least one, a small mark of style and pride that is part of the city's character.