Roland Ayers, Earth Masses Moving

A series of cloud-like faces in profile seem to float amid masses of trees and clumps of earth. According to Ayers’s widow, Sheila Whitelaw, the artist said that figures like these sometimes represent the ghosts of generations of African Americans who suffered and died under the chains of slavery, the brutality of Jim Crow America, and persistent racism. Perhaps this image of trees and mysterious faces conjures the relationship of Black individuals to the trees used for lynchings and whippings.