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Artwork Description

“My still lives actively engage with a particular art historical genre and contemporary modes of address. I began to explore still lives more deeply in 2010 while studying in the Rijksmuseum Research Library in Amsterdam. In this example from the Midday Series, an autobiographical novel, Manchild in the Promised Land, details author Claude Brown’s transition from childhood to adulthood in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s. The opening lines of the novel—‘Where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?’—refers to New York as a place of false promise for many southern-born African Americans who emigrated north after the Great Depression. As the sons and daughters of these émigrés, the characters in Brown’s novel are inheritors of this question. Written and published in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement, Manchild in the Promised Land is considered a classic of American literature.” — Leslie Hewitt