Mama’s Sweet Tea
Mama’s Sweet Tea is more than just a body of work or a series of artwork; it’s my love letter to the South, written in both admiration and critique. This body of work dives deep into the complicated relationship I have with my southern roots—a mix of the love, warmth, and beauty, and the pain, history, and tension that shaped me. Growing up in Louisiana, the South imprinted itself on me in a way that’s as sweet as my mama’s tea and as bitter as the memories that come with it.
I’ve always worked in the narrative form, but in Mama’s Sweet Tea, these narratives take on a more personal tone, capturing the layers of my own southern experience. This collection of 30 small graphite and gold leaf pieces continues my exploration of the female form, reflecting the emotions, strength, and complexity of the women who inhabit the South—real and imagined. Each portrait speaks to a story, a moment, a mood, and I juxtapose these figures with icons that have deeply personal meaning to me.
The symbols in this series are not random; they’re a reflection of my own memories. I’m incorporating a lot of magnolia flowers—an ever-present reminder of southern beauty—and cotton, which has a deep connection to my life. I worked in the cotton fields as one of my first jobs, growing up in the heart of cotton country. Birds appear throughout, too—drawing a pelican, the symbol of Louisiana, in third grade was when I first realized I wanted to be an artist. These icons, drawn in graphite and highlighted with gold leaf, add layers to the narrative, bringing together the nostalgia and complexity of my relationship with the South. Even church, which was once a central part of my upbringing and now represents a different kind of reflection for me, finds its way into these pieces, subtly and symbolically.
The South raised me—there’s no escaping that. It made me tough, resilient, like the "steel magnolias" it’s famous for, a strength that I feel only women truly hold. It gave me a love of the earth, a connection to its beauty and its brutality. But it also gave me shame. As I grew older and learned about the deep-seated racism that permeated the very ground I walked on, I had to confront the implicit biases that the South embedded in me. Even now, I am unlearning, peeling back those layers and trying to understand how to remove them. But it’s not all about pain. Life is a mix of love and hardship, and I’ve learned to trust the process—the bad comes, but it goes, and the good, which has always been there, returns. The South gave me both, and Mama’s Sweet Tea reflects that duality.
This project isn’t just about the art, though. It’s part of a larger story that I’m telling in a coffee table-style book, also titled Mama’s Sweet Tea. The book will feature all 30 pieces alongside my mama’s recipes—simple but soulful dishes that she raised us on. These recipes, handwritten on old notecards that are probably as old as I am, are precious artifacts of love. I didn’t appreciate my mama’s cooking as much as I should have when I was younger. I didn’t realize that each meal she made, especially as a single mom, was her way of saying ‘I love you.’
Now, looking back, I see the love in every pot of gumbo, in every cake she baked from scratch. Food was her language, and in this book, it becomes part of mine. The recipes will sit next to short memoir-like essays—stories from my life that connect the dots between the art, the food, and the woman I’ve become.
Mama’s Sweet Tea is a reflection of my journey as an artist and a woman. It’s about family, food, memory, and the South. But more than anything, it’s about finding peace in the tension, the love and the pain, and weaving it all together into something beautiful.
