ORIGIN

This project is a self-designed catalogue for my first solo exhibition, ORIGIN, at Justine Kurland Studio in Brooklyn, NY. ORIGIN was inspired by a dream I had in which I witnessed the birth of my great-grandfather, Reverend Edmund Oxley, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard Divinity School in 1909. Expanding on this cyclical image of birth, I dissected photographs of my childhood and incorporated them into vibrantly colored paintings of female reproductive anatomy. Portraits of my ancestors emerge from psychedelic wombs, tracing the umbilical cord of my lineage through the folds and curves of the vaginal canal.
The project pays homage to the power of the Black mother as a giver of life, the wellspring from whom history emerges.

Boom Boom Fruit by River Steinbach age 6 circa 2010