“Moonlight: Respite of the Black Madonnas” Featured in Hammer & Hope

I'm honored that my collage Moonlight: Respite of the Black Madonnas was selected to illustrate the article "The Climate Movement Should Become a Human Movement" by authors Rhiana Gunn-Wright and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in the Spring 2025 issue of Hammer & Hope.

The article is a powerful exchange on how climate activism must evolve to center human lives and material realities. Gunn-Wright and Táíwò challenge the traditional, technocratic frames of the climate movement and instead propose an emotional, justice-centered approach rooted in solidarity, community, and lived experience. Their conversation reflects a growing call to move beyond charts and policy briefs toward movement-building that recognizes interconnected struggles — from environmental racism to economic precarity to immigration.

Moonlight: Respite of the Black Madonnas, part of my Moonlight collage series, aligns closely with this vision. Created in 2022, the collage depicts a Black women at ease within a lush, imagined landscape. This work is about refusal: a refusal to be defined solely by struggle or labor. It imagines Black women not as caretakers of a land that exploits them, but as caretakers of themselves, held and replenished by the natural world. The figures in this piece they are not producing or surviving, but rather they are resting, inhabiting space fully and freely. That kind of rest is both a practice of care and a political statement.

In a moment when climate conversations often feel disembodied or distant, it means something to see this work in dialogue with thinkers who are demanding a deeper, more human movement that honors how people actually live, suffer, and care for one another. I’m grateful to Hammer & Hope for placing Moonlight in such a resonant and thoughtful context.

You can read the full article here and view more from the Moonlight series here.