The Object Lesson

The Harlem Renaissance was, among many things, an argument — that Black elegance, intellect, and art deserved to be seen fully, on their own terms, rather than through the distorting lens of who was doing the looking. The Object Lesson returns to that moment, and to that argument, through a series of portraits of Black women rendered in white: draped in silk and satin, framed by archways, palms, and the hush of interior light. The color recalls a golden age of Black style and self-invention, but white here is not passivity — it is the color of the blank page before it is written, of a space claimed rather than given.
None of the women meet the viewer's eye. Their gazes are lowered, turned inward or elsewhere, present but withheld. This is the lesson embedded in the title, which plays on a double meaning: an object lesson is something meant to teach through example, yet these women resist being reduced to objects at all. To look is not to know. To behold is not to possess. The women in this series are not waiting to be discovered — they already know exactly who they are. The viewer is simply catching up.