2026
Archival pigment print on Moab Estrada Rag Bright
8×10 (image size); 8.5×11 (print size)
Open edition
Signed on verso

Hierarchies (Messiah Complex) arranges Kwame Ture, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), Martin Luther King Jr., Tyler Perry, Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton, and a Blackened “white Jesus” into an inverted cross, collapsing political leadership, celebrity, performance, and religious iconography into a single structure of authority. The work considers how Black political memory is organized through masculine figures who are elevated into symbols, martyrs, heroes, and substitutes for collective struggle. Patriarchy operates here as a hierarchy of its own, shaping who is permitted to represent a people, whose image becomes monumental, and how leadership is imagined through masculinity, charisma, and exceptional individuals. By placing revolutionaries, actors, entertainers, and sacred imagery within the same visual system, the work questions the desire for messiahs and asks what forms of power are reproduced when liberation is repeatedly pictured through men positioned above the collective.