Camara A. Ward

These works were a response to the 2020 uprisings following the police killing of George Floyd. My politics and my Black identity have always been key to my life but in recent years they have become much more explicit in the art that I make. This first piece is a triptych of portraits of Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd whose lives were cut short by U. S. police this year. Their deaths are individual tragedies but indicative of the oppressive system which leaves too many in early graves. The second piece is a chapbook zine, collecting three Golden Shovel poems I wrote using a line from Danez Smith’s “juxtaposing the black boy and the bullet”. I built thematically from Smith’s line to develop three poems and corresponding spreads that illustrate the many ways that young black men are failed by the U. S. justice system. Whether their lives are wasted in jail at disproportionate rates, their murders dismissed in court, or their lives are taken by police, there is rarely justice for young black men. Both works use color schemes inspired by the graphic designs of W. E. B. DuBois and the Pan-African flag.