I restaged Manet's Olympia (1863), a painting whose scandal at the time had less to do with the reclining nude than
with what she represented — but whose composition also relegated a Black maid to the margins, a figure art history
spent a century failing to name or center. I take the reclining position myself, and in place of the maid, my own two
sons appear dressed as young warriors. The substitution does more than reverse who occupies the frame's center: it
replaces Manet's racial hierarchy with a matriarchal family unit, turning a composition built on Black erasure into one
built on Black authorship and care. The details resist what critic Claudia Tate termed “racial protocol” — the
expectation that Black bodies in realist images correspond to fixed markers of class and race — the locks, the carved
wooden spears, the mixed-race children dressed as warriors sit outside those inherited categories entirely.