About "A Letter to my Niece and Nephew"

A Letter to My Nephew

Copper engraving, Mixed Media Collage, Giclée Print

28'x40"

2025

A Letter to My Niece

Copper engraving, Mixed Media Collage, Giclée Print

28'x40"

2025

A Letter to My Niece and Nephew is a deeply personal work inspired by the writings of James Baldwin—particularly My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew—and by the writings of Jarvis Jay Masters, an incarcerated author currently on death row in California. Both writers use language as a means of survival, reflection, and resistance, addressing younger generations with honesty, care, and an acute awareness of the forces that shape Black life in America. Their words are not simply messages of warning or hope, but acts of witnessing.

James Baldwin’s letter, written to his nephew, has long stayed with me because of the way it moves between intimacy and structural critique. Baldwin speaks about family, about his brother, and about the ways the United States shaped—and in many ways harmed—the men in his life. At the same time, he affirms his nephew’s humanity, beauty, and capacity to exist fully in a world that has historically refused to recognize Black people as such. The letter is tender, but it is also a warning: the world will try to change you, define you, and limit you. If you allow it to fully dictate who you are, you risk becoming invisible—not only to others, but to yourself. For Black people, who are already rendered invisible through systemic erasure, this loss of self carries an even deeper weight.

These ideas resonate profoundly with my own life and family. I think often about my nieces and nephews—energetic, curious, and deeply engaged with the world around them. They are intelligent, creative, and full of possibility. Many of them are already involved in robotics clubs, science programs, or the arts, and they approach life with a joy and openness that feels precious and fragile. I find myself constantly thinking about the world they will inherit, and how it might shape them in ways both visible and unseen.

As a middle child, I occupy a unique position within my family. I have older cousins whom I consider siblings, and younger cousins who feel the same. Growing up close to one another, I witnessed how the world changed those who came before me—how they adapted, masked themselves, or were worn down by social pressures and systemic harm. Now, I am watching similar forces act upon the younger generation in real time, as they move from toddlers into children and eventually into adolescence. I have experienced these changes myself. I have felt the ways the world can batter and exhaust you. Yet, despite this, I continue to persist. What I wish most is that my nieces and nephews are able to hold onto their light for as long as possible.

My work often engages difficult, heavy, and controversial subject matter—not because I seek provocation, but because honesty demands it. In making A Letter to My Niece, I wanted to create something that functioned as an act of care. This piece is a visual letter—one that says: I see you. I acknowledge you. I love you. It seeks to preserve and honor the complex beauty that exists within them, and to affirm that they deserve futures filled with possibility, even within a world that frequently denies that possibility to Black people.

The process of making this work is rooted in research, memory, and reconstruction. I began by using visits with my nieces and nephews as a baseline—observing their gestures, energy, and presence. From there, I turned to my archive of engravings, particularly a book titled Africa and Its Inhabitants, searching for faces and figures that carried a striking familiarity—images that echoed the spirit and humanity of my family rather than reducing them to historical artifacts.

As I built the composition, I sketched extensively, mapping out the kaleidoscopic structures that appear throughout the work and determining which elements required drawing or engraving to achieve the necessary level of detail. When textures or imagery could not be found, I made them myself. In this piece, I was drawn to an engraving of a wave from the 1870s, but the quality and clarity did not meet my needs. I chose to re-engrave the wave by hand, reshaping it to align with the emotional and visual language of the work.

The final image was assembled through a combination of analog and digital collage. Each decision—what to include, what to obscure, what to remake—was intentional, ensuring that every element aligned with my vision and the story being told. The work was then printed on high-quality archival watercolor paper using archival inks, allowing the image to endure physically, just as the message it carries seeks to endure across generations.

A Letter to My Niece exists at the intersection of history, family, and futurity. It is both deeply personal and broadly reflective, grounded in research but driven by love. It is a testament to the stories we inherit, the stories we survive, and the stories still waiting to be told.