This submission is a collection of first-person accounts of individuals dealing with their complex emotions involving racial injustice and civil unrest.

The participants of this collection include friends, colleagues and others crowd-sourced through social media platforms. Each person contributed a personal statement, essay, poem or vision of what it is like living in their own skin. I selected excerpts from each submission along with photos of the individuals who shared these powerful messages. Each of the black & white portraits I created combine an artful play between the typography of words and phrases set against layered depths of the translucent building of grayscale watercolor. Key words were chosen to be bold - emphasizing a hierarchy and importance of the impact they had to me as I attempted to capture the tone and the voice of each author.

The purpose of this collection is to illicit a visceral response from the viewer. My hope is that the audience can feel connected to each story and envelop themselves in each person’s words as they wanted to have them told and shared with the world.