STORIED IN COLOR :: I have always been captivated, saddened, and angered by the drawings of slave ships. The individual people are drawn almost identically, like a stamp repeated over and over again. I keep a schematic of the Slave Ship Brooks above my desk and often get lost in looking at all the individual people drawn and wonder who they were, what they felt, how they lived in their homeland, what their stories were. This project was my way of putting a face to some of these mindlessly drawn schematics. The people painted in the pictures are from archival photographs of Key West residents and a few of my friends whose history ties to descendants of the people in such drawings.
This project and body of work was made possible in part by a grant from the Anne McKee Artists Fund of the Florida Keys, Inc.