Marie is a series of portraits drawn on antique cooking pans. The portraits are of black female domestic workers who might have labored in similar situations as my maternal grandmother, who cleaned homes in the American South during the 1940s and 50s.

 

There are no portraits of my grandmother, Marie Talbert, from this period doing this kind of work, so I drew upon archival photographs taken by WPA photographers of maids and cooks doing domestic work. 

 

This type of labor - deemed by society as menial, often  goes unacknowledged and is seen to be without honor, yet my grandmother was always proud and unbowed, and it was integral to allowing my mother, her siblings, and their descendants to make their own way in the world.