Rhapsody Wrapped in Blues began with a question from a child.
During my January residency with the Miami Children’s Museum, one young visitor asked if we could use pipe cleaners on the cart. That moment of curiosity stayed with me. There was something so tender in the request—something playful, intuitive, and wise. It cracked open a new way of thinking about material, and I began wrapping the child-sized shopping cart with pipe cleaners soon after.
The color palette, however, was already whispering to me—shaped by the books I’d been reading, each a meditation on memory, grief, and the enduring presence of Black life.
Small metal shopping cart, pipe cleaners, faux fur, 12 yards ribbon, pom poms
10.5 x 8 x 12 in
2025
Imani Perry’s Black in Blues reminded me that blue is more than a color; it’s a carrier of ancestral sorrow and sonic resistance. In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, I found language for the feeling of constantly living with the residue of catastrophe—of mourning that doesn’t end. That wake lives in the soft textures of the faux fur, the tangle of pipe cleaners, the miles of ribbon.
Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother haunted my hands as I wrapped each bar of the cart. I imagined the women she walked with, the ruptures she named. Judith Carney’s In the Shadow of Slavery reminded me of the sacred knowledge carried through seeds and roots. These readings weren’t just research—they were spirit guides.
I also carried the wisdom of Braiding Sweetgrass—Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for reciprocal relationship with the natural world—and Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, which taught me how an object can become a vessel for remembrance when language fails.
Together, these stories, these materials, and that one child’s question converged.
Rhapsody Wrapped in Blues is a power object disguised in softness. A rolling vessel. A visual blues ballad made from pipe cleaners, pom poms, faux fur, and 12 yards of ribbon. It holds the weight of what we carry—from the microaggressions we’re taught to swallow, to the ancestral griefs that linger in our DNA.
It’s playful. It’s painful. It’s both.
Because sometimes healing begins when we let a child’s question guide us toward our own.
