Tell My Babies, I Love Them

Collaboration with Lora-Ellen McKinney, 2022

Tell My Babies, I Love Them is a response to Lora-Ellen McKinney’s poem, “Eight Minutes Forty-Six Seconds and Forever” about George Floyd and police violence against Black people. This work is two-sided, one side is full of bold colors and patterns, the other is entirely white on white techniques. Whitework techniques are my method of addressing white people’s roles in white supremacy. And here I focus on manipulation and systems of control with a list of Rules & Regulations, over seen by a ghosted outline of Derrick Chauvin. On the colorful side, the quilting visually represents the number of people killed by the police in 2021 with the darkest pattern equaling 3 or more deaths in one day. It also features a thin translucent globe, a few quotes from McKinney’s poem, and speaks to the precarity of hope and the threat of resistance.