taurean j. webb.
ye shall inherit the earth
cohort. 2024-25
project. Ye Shall Inherit the Earth: A Portrait Ballad to Black-Palestine
location. Chicago, IL
medium. visual arts
Ye Shall Inherit the Earth: A Portrait Ballad to Black-Palestine, a visual arts exhibit, on-display and traveling from 2020-2025—invited African diasporic and Palestinian exilic artists to mobilize portraiture-as-form (via painting, sketch, digital collage, digital print, sculpture, and photography) to reflect upon the relationship between humanity and the sacred. Inherit is both a tribute to the beauty of African Diasporic and Arab culture, as well as a commentary about the ways that all of humanity— regardless of social location or context—reflects the sacred.
This exhibition aims to capture the spirit of culture and freedom-making in moments when they transcend the boundaries of group, nation, religious affiliation, or class, bringing us closer to the possibilities present in joint global justice work. In the US and elsewhere around the world, there is a long history of joint liberation struggles between African- and Arab- descended peoples, fighting similar issues of xenophobia, racism, gender-based inequality and other social problems. For this reason, Inherit centers the works and lived experiences of artists who self-identify as of Palestinian-, Lebanese-, or African-descended.
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This exhibition is especially interested in fostering conversations at the intersection of religious expression, human rights and culture within and for communities that would not ordinarily be in dialogue with such artists, cultures or perspectives.
exhibit walkthrough.
The documentary-style film, Marking Time, Passing Through Exile—shaped both by participatory and expository film methods—is a cinematic companion to the exhibit, centering the show’s artists as they give account of the ways that their craft awakens questions of sacrality and ultimate concern: loss, time, embodiment, affect, and the untethering of subjects from uselessly utopian visions.
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The following artifacts are three (3) interviews, sampled from the nine (9) total interviews that constitute the bulk of the film’s footage. The featured artists—Nikki Quamina-Woo (Afro-Hawaiian photojournalist), Lux Eterna (Palestinian-Australian mixed-media artist), and Andrea Coleman (African American digital collagist)—in talking about their respective crafts, capture the heart of the Inherit the Earth/ Marking Time ethos. In conjunction with the film’s scheduled release in Fall 2025, the interviews featured here offer a snapshot of the larger project and process Insofar as the forthcoming film is set for release in Fall 2025, I wanted to include a brief annotated snapshot to give viewers an opportunity to engage with some of the featured artists as they engage questions of sacrality, religion, and the arts.
portraiture as sacred technology, displacement, and ‘black religion’.
Each of the featured artists treat the human image as a vessel for spirit, memory, and the unseen: Coleman enlarges family photos until they live and breathe and become reborn, insisting that viewers enter the subject’s orbit rather than the reverse. Quamina-Woo frames her work as a corrective to the “noble-savage” gaze, a way of holding another person’s sacredness long enough for recognition to occur. And Eterna positions her self-portrait in a colonized Australian landscape to “house the spirit” of a displaced people.
Central to this question of sacrality is the presumption of movement—diaspora, migration, displacement, even the smearings and distortions of images across a canvas—as some sort of signal toward the sacred. In the case of Black and Palestinian ethnic migrations, the artists make room for woundedness caused by forced displacement and the possibility of creative work to fill those voids. Each interview revisits that first wound—whether that means probing the estrangement of Palestinians in Australia and the need for a decolonial solution; tracking communities whose culture has “enveloped around a wound and kept growing,” from Zanzibar to Buenaventura, as Quamina-Woo notes; or exploring ancestral artifacts and family photographs as portals whereby “trauma, celebration, and visitations” coexist.
As a scholar of Black religious histories, I understand the concept capaciously. In both that spirit and the spirit in which I situate my work for Crossroads, it is the discursive and ritualistic formations of both Black and non-Black communities that, I suggest, tap into a kind of “sacrality” that is particularly given voice within Africana thought. The mysticism in Andrea Coleman’s process (as she notes in the interview), the idea of land-as-extension of the human body (to which Eterna gives voice), and the ethic of empathic immersion that Quamina-Woo models all gesture toward a black-ened sacrality that is uniquely captured by renderings of the ordinariness of the human form.
artists.
 Leila Abdelrazaq |  Alpha Bruton |  Andrea Coleman |
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 Shirien Damra |  Lux Eterna |  Charles Haddad |
 James Hill Jr. |  Nicky Quamina-Woo |  Salem Al Qudwa |
 Max Sansing |  Steve Wanna |  Tauren J. Webb |
Leila Abdelrazaq
Maqam of Moonlight Trilogy
Ghassan Kanafani
Leila Abdelrazaq (b. 1992, Chicago) is a Palestinian author and artist. Her debut graphic novel, Baddawi (Just World Books 2015), was shortlisted for the 2015 Palestine Book Awards and has been translated into three languages. She is also the creator of a number of zines and short comics.
Leila’s creative work primarily explores issues related to diaspora, refugeehood, history, memory, and borders. She earned her MA in Modern Middle Eastern & North African Studies from the University of Michigan in 2020, where her research focused on Palestinian futurist art and post-national imaginaries.
Maqam of Moonlight Trilogy
This series of three illustrations was created to accompany a trilogy of poems from Palestinian poet George Abraham’s book, The Specimen’s Apology. Together, the three images, like the three poems they accompany, tell a story of their own. The visual story does not mirror the poems exactly, but rather moves in conversation with them. When developing illustrations for the book, the aim was to create poetic images which themselves would also provoke thought or highlight particular facets of each poem.
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Ghassan Kanafani
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This linoleum-block carved portrait of acclaimed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani was created for the Palestinian Youth Movement’s 2019 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship. The illustration is based loosely on a well-known photograph of Kanafani. In the play between stark light and dark that block prints lend themselves to, I wanted to visually capture both Kanafani’s luminary brilliance and his depth of thought in my portrait of him.
Alpha Bruton
Spirit Keeper, “Lilith”
Spirit Keeper, “Quietest Moment Before the Dawn”
Alpha Bruton is a painter and an environmental installation artist who synthesizes set design, film theatre, sculpture, and other two-dimensional forms. Alpha Bruton creates environmental art installations where objects and images are selected to “serve as cultural mirrors," The sites in which they are situated serve as part of a broader cultural commentary. She believes that objects in the public sphere communicate and reinforce certain cultural narratives, hierarchies, and social mythologies. She feels that she makes artwork that demands the audience to confront art and activism issues; she also makes art representational and provocative. What inspires her most is the feeling that she has a social responsibility as an artist to record history and to thrust awareness about life and the earth upon the viewer—to cast another perspective from which to view the world.
Her curatorial practice is the Phantom Gallery Chicago Network. The Phantom Galleries are temporary exhibitions in nontraditional gallery settings. She is a co-author and researcher for Pop Up Research Station and Creative Conversation, a portal where curators nationally share knowledge, resources of best practices, ongoing professional development, and a place for moral support to enhance our collective impact while staging pop-up exhibitions. As a chief curator, she has challenged collaborating artists to present temporary installations that engage in public interaction by experimenting with every combination and playing around with a genuine approach to each investigation from the beginning to the end. These new installations are a window to the imaginary, a summons, and an overture to a dialogue.
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In the last decade, she has traveled nationally and internationally created art as an artist-in-resident engaging community in artmaking. She has created temporary installations in City Lots, along the pedestrian walkway, in National Forest Preserves, on Land Trust to Conservatorships, empty storefronts as alternative spaces, and Museum settings.
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She is currently represented by Gallery Guichard of Chicago, IL, and a 2021 Curatorial Fellow at the Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL. Examining the State of the Environment, “Either Wrong or Right Just Examine.”
California: Los Angeles Jovenes Art Park sculpture installation, Sojourner Truth African Heritage Museum, Visual Arts Development Project in Sacramento. International Society of Altar Making. Florida: Miami Art Week/Art Basel in Overton, Kroma Art Space, Coconut Grove.
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Illinois: Bronzeville Art District, Common Grounds Overton Project, “Anarchitectural Library 2019- 2020, Chicago Cultural Center Architecture Biennial, “Peace Tower” Mark di Suvero, Chicago Cultural Center, Griffin Gallery, Gallery Guichard, Experimental Station, Evanston Art Center, Murphy Hill Gallery, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Roger Brown Gallery, Tarble Art Center Eastern Illinois University, William G. Hill Gallery. Virginia: Artomatic in Crystal City. International projects: Art on Armitage, Chicago - Supermarket 2015 Stockholm Sweden Independent Art Fair, Berlin, Pankow East Berlin, Hannover, a Global Art Space/Berlin Art Club, International Art Group., “Encounters” Vancouver Canada, Sacramento California, and Mexico City, Mexico.
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I started painting spirit keepers in the early ’80s. Not in reproduction, but periodically I have been asked to collaborate with other installation artists, poets, or altar builders, using my spirit keeper paintings of women to represent the four directions. The rituals at the heart of the Shamanic path are the contract to live in harmony with nature, self, community, and spirit.
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When painting, I believe in the positive, life-affirming, and carry that flag of positive power while creating the work. As taught through Native American knowledge, using the four directions is deeply embedded with symbolism and guidance for transformation. I smudge and cleaning the space is the preparation.
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Spirit Keeper, “Lilith,” Acrylic on Paper
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Spirit Keeping is the act of keeping spirits of once, living entities as friends & companions, typically bound to a vessel or yourself. People who do this are known as Spirit Keepers. In its most basic form of conjuring a spirit & conversing with it or giving it a task. It is meant to converse with spirits for a purpose, ask a question, ask them for help, and ask for guidance, usually for a temporary amount of time, not for an ongoing life choice.
All spirits come of their own, free will to choose to spend their time with a Spirit Keeper. Spirits provide insight into life that cannot otherwise be obtained. They can help you with countless things throughout your daily life & your paranormal path. This way, they know they cannot be tampered with, encroached upon, or otherwise impeded upon by anyone other than yourself.
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Spirit Keeper, "Quietest Moment Before the Dawn," Acrylic on Paper
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Why paint the Lilith myth? I do not believe she is a myth. I believe in the power of angles that they are all around us, Hebrew 1:6 “Let all the angels of God worship him.” Hebrew 13:1 “Love your fellow Christian always, do not neglect to show hospitality. It is said that this spirit can affect our homes as well as our churches. This spirit causes division and even attacks our children. This spirit is also associated with seduction. It moves like the wind swift.
The Sumerians were powerful people, and like all the histories of mighty empires, and their way of worship, has been distorted depending on who is recording their narrative. First, Sumer was an ancient civilization founded in the Mesopotamia region of the Fertile Crescent situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Known for their innovations in language, governance, architecture, and more, Sumerians are the creators of civilization as modern humans understand it. Second, their control of the region lasted for a short of 2,000 years before the Babylonians took charge in 2004 B.C.
Andrea Coleman
Andrea Coleman is a Chicago-based artist who utilizes the various media of oils, acrylic paints, magazine clippings and digital prints. Inspired by her suburban upbringing, animation, and various mural artists, her work currently investigates the interconnectedness of aura and narrative. Coleman graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a BFA degree.​
Coleman’s work could be described as contemporary nostalgia. Her digital paintings and collages source representational photographic family memorabilia, archival imagery, clippings, videos, and oral histories. Combined with expressive mark-making and coloration, each piece addresses elements of nostalgia and a distorted form of memory. These works challenge the very idea of memory. Its authenticity and reliability through the combination of the real and the imagined. The work masterfully constructs memories that are oftentimes recollected from different family members to create larger visual narratives through digital manipulation.
Consistent with the themes of the Inherit exhibition, Coleman’s work investigates the intuitive interconnectedness ad multidimensional relationship between snapshot and portraiture. Her work is both intimate and joyous, and attempts to unify, initiate and diversify a basic human experience that echoes the voices of our ancestors that make us universal in our vulnerability, regardless of race, gender or religion. From the simple act of flipping through old photo albums to recalling past events, I hope the work gives a platform to a type of familiarity that provokes an understanding that can only be absorbed emotionally.
Shirien Damra
"Let Yourself Rest"
“Ramadan Kareem”
“Justice for Breonna Taylor”
Shirien Damra is a Palestinian artist and organizer based in Chicago. Shirien studied sociology at DePaul University, receiving her bachelor's and master's degree in the field.
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Coming from a family of Palestinian refugees, early on, Shirien had a sense of what injustice and racism looked like through her own family’s experience of ethnic cleansing in Palestine and their experiences here as immigrants in this country. As she grew older, she started learning and understanding more of how structural oppression functions in the U.S. and who it targets.
Shirien growing up as woman of color in a working-class neighborhood made her aware of the interconnectedness between the struggles of many different marginalized communities, whether they be Black, Palestinian, Indigenous, etc. While each struggle is unique, she learned that we don’t face oppression within our own bubbles—it’s systemic and touches us all to varying degrees.
Her lived experiences and her sociology education also showed her how classism, racism and patriarchy are systems that are woven together. She began applying this intersectional understanding to community organizing and building, both on and off campus.
Shirien fell in love with art when she was in elementary school and carried it with her throughout adulthood as a way for her to express and ground herself through life’s turbulent experiences from health crises to financial hardship. But for many years, Shirien kept her passion for art and her passion for social justice separate. As she dove deeper into her organizing work, her artistic side felt neglected.
In 2015, Shirien was diagnosed with cancer and was forced to slow down and for the first time in years. She had to halt her organizing work while she was being treated for cancer. It was during this time in which Shirien realized that art was missing from her life, and promised herself that art would be part of her work moving forward.
After being moved by the work of social justice artists like Micah Bazant, Melanie Cervantes, Molly Crabapple, and many others, Shirien started to see the power of connecting her two passions of art and social justice.
While Shirien has been drawing and painting since childhood, for the past few years, she has been using digital illustration and design as her primary mediums and developed her own simple yet colorful style.
In the past year, Shirien has been working full-time as a freelance artist, focusing on uplifting social justice movements. Her art offers ways to challenge the status quo by uplifting marginalized communities, opening an outlet for community healing, breaking barriers and bringing together communities in solidarity. Shirien hopes that her art can inspire the viewer to envision a better world and take action against injustice, wherever it exists.
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"Let Yourself Rest"
January 2020
Digital painting with Procreate, Apple Pencil and iPad
24" x 18"
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No matter what field you’re in, in our capitalistic society, since childhood we have internalized that our productivity is inherently tied to our worth. And for most of us who are not born into privilege, we feel like we don’t have the luxury to rest and practice self-care when we need to pay the bills. But we aren’t meant to be constantly working. Our lives are meant to be multi-faceted. Our bodies and minds need to rest and reflect. We must undo our capitalist conditioning and have tenderness and patience with ourselves and our bodies. Featuring a starry bold blue sky surrounding a woman wearing soft pastel colors and closed eyes, this piece serves as a reminder that we must let ourselves rest, reflect, experience joy in the little things, and dream outside of the confines of producing. We are allowed to simply just be. And that is enough.
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“Ramadan Kareem”
April 2020
Digital painting with Procreate, Apple Pencil and iPad
30" x 20"
This piece was created as Ramadan began in 2020, a month into COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in the US. For most Muslims, Ramadan is characterized by family and community prayers and iftars (iftar is a meal eaten by Muslims after sunset during Ramadan to break their fast). 2020 was the first time spending Ramadan alone for many Muslims, but this work attempts to see the blessing in that. That perhaps being quarantined allowed us more time to self reflect and focus more on our own healing and our relationship with Allah (swt). Featuring warm colors, “Ramadan Mubarak” depicts a Muslim woman observing Ramadan alone, sitting on her window sill making dhikr with her prayer beads as she closes her eyes in spiritual reflection.
“Justice for Breonna Taylor”
May 2020
Digital painting with Procreate, Apple Pencil and iPad
24” x 36”
Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT in Louisville, was shot and killed by police in the middle of the night in her own home on March 13, 2020. Like many, when I learned of Breonna's story, I was angry and heartbroken. I created “Justice for Breonna Taylor'' in hopes of drawing attention to the senseless police violence that ripped Breonna away from her loved ones, but in a way that celebrates and honors her life. Throughout history, we have seen victims of anti-Black violence demonized as some kind of justification for their murders. I wanted to challenge that demonization by creating a memorial piece that is soft and loving for Breonna. I used bold, vibrant colors to uplift and inspire the viewer to take action against this injustice. The flowers symbolize life and growth, in defiance of systemic violence and oppression.​
Lux Eterna
Lux Eterna is a Western Sydney based interdisciplinary artist exploring the embodied gaze, authoring post-human futures, decolonisation and awareness. She won the Cumberland Art Prize for her Birch Tree Study 2018 made on residency at Arteles, Finland. Following a 2017 residency at Critical Path, performed in 2018 her co-devised work Soft Prosthetics & Metal Gods as part of Legs on the Wall’s double bill Above Ground with long time collaborator Kathryn Puie; the work is to be auspiced by Branch Nebula for future development. Lux has facilitated for Marina Abramovic 2015 and performed in DeQuincey Co’s Platform 2017 as well as being a live videographer in Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s The Second Woman, Liveworks Festival 2017. Lux’s video and 2D works have been exhibited at Peacock, Gaffa, Interlude, 107 Projects galleries alongside being granted residencies at Bundanon Trust, NSW and Arteles, Finland. A recent Create NSW quick response recipient; her last solo exhibition Decolonising the Gaze are now featuring in a group exhibition at the Museum of the Palestinian People, Washington DC, USA, March - Aug 2020 for which she attended the opening and gave a performance.
Charles Toufic Haddad
Yolla’s Sister
Teta ‘Adla
George Milhem Haddad with his daughter Sylvia
Portraiture compelled me from the beginning of my relationship with photography. Just as the design of a building is the disciplined creation of a space for human activity, the composition of a portrait is the disciplined creation of a space for a human person: their physical and spiritual reality. How one composes a portrait is like how the architect designs a compelling relationship between form, function, materials and context—all with the end goal of hosting life.
"A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare."—Mahmoud Darwish
“We [Palestinians] suffer from an incurable malady: Hope.”—Mahmoud Darwish
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Notes on Equipment
I was gifted my first camera as a teen by my aunts and uncle when we were living in Aleppo; there was no money for hobbies, but they wanted to give their nephew, displaced from home and friends, some distracting fun for his birthday. A Kodak box camera, it was extremely limiting with its tiny prints, but I enjoyed exploring its capacities. When a large formal portrait of a handsome German gentleman went on display in the window of a local photo studio, however, I questioned the studio owner about what kind of a camera one would need to create something similar. He gave me a list of specifications, but what he described was far beyond my family’s financial reach.
In a few more years, upon graduation from the American University of Beirut, I was hired by the Kuwait Ministry of Planning as a civil engineer and architect. Upon arrival in Kuwait, I sent all my disposable earnings to my parents each month—until I was approached for a consulting job on the side. I decided to use the money from that contract—money my family was not expecting—to order a real camera, a Leica M-3 and a matching portrait lens.
It was with my Leica that I began taking portraits, initially photographing my fellow expatriates and migrant workers and our life in Kuwait. Then, on my first visit back to Syria, I began a series of my family and fellow Palestinian refugees. The three portraits here are from that series, all taken in 1958.
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In the case of Yolla’s Sister, here was a classically beautiful young woman, joyful and full of life, who somehow fit in the space in which I encountered her—one of the Damascus apartments in which our families had found refuge. All that was left for me was to guide her into the position which would best expose her stunning, sculptural reality—the light, shadow, and radiance that she was in that living room.
Teta ‘Adla, a few months before she died, is also truly met as both a physical and spiritual reality. I did not ask her to smile, just to sit for me. At 98, she still asserted a well-practiced discipline about her appearance; every day, she wore black in memory of her husband Shoukry—lost at a young age to the ravages of Ottoman imprisonment—and her signature chignon hairstyle and earrings. But with her exacting personality and a long and difficult life now submerged in dementia, her eyes look upon the verge of infinity.
Finally, George Milhem Haddad with his daughter Sylvia captures the loving relationship of a father and daughter, as it manifested itself spontaneously in front of me. I had asked Uncle George to pose by himself initially, wanting to capture how dignified and well put together he was, even as the family struggled under extremely difficult circumstances. But as I worked to compose the shot, Sylvia stepped in and I was not sorry. Their easy physical intimacy and delight in one another was irrepressible; the lovely print of her dress reminiscent of happier days
James Howard Hill Jr.
Dr. James Howard Hill, Jr. is an essayist, photographer, and philosopher of religion and culture, currently serving as Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University. His academic journey reflects a deep commitment to exploring the intersections of religion, culture, and politics, with a particular focus on Black diasporic thought and popular culture.
Dr. Hill holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Criswell College, where he began to develop his interest in the philosophical underpinnings of religion. He furthered his studies by earning a Master of Theological Studies from Southern Methodist University, which provided him with a strong foundation in theological inquiry and critical analysis. He completed his academic formation with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where he honed his focus on the dynamics of philosophy, religion, and political theory.
As a philosopher of religion, Dr. Hill engages with fundamental questions about power, faith, and the unfinished project of freedom in the United States and throughout the world. He challenges traditional paradigms and advocates for a deeper apprehension of how religious practices and convictions inform political and cultural realities. His interdisciplinary approach not only honors the Western philosophical and theological tradition but also seeks to expand it by incorporating diverse perspectives, particularly those arising from Black American experiences.
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His artistic journey is deeply rooted in the transformative power of photography, driven by a desire to transmute the heightened hypervigilance stemming from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) into compelling works of art. Hypervigilance, a response to trauma, often arises from unpredictable and chaotic childhood experiences, profoundly shaping emotional and creative development. Through his own challenges with C-PTSD, Dr. Hill discovered a language to articulate how these childhood traumas continue to resonate in his life. Therapy has empowered him to harness this energy, channeling it into his artistic practice. The artwork presented here explores the complex interplay of trauma, familial potential, and the diverse ways in which Black art can be instrumentalized in service of the greater murmuration of Black creative possibilities.
Nicky Quamina-Woo
Nicky Quamina-Woo is a Black + Native Hawaiian documentary photographer dividing her time between the African continent, Southeast Asia and New York City. Her fascination with the tenacity of the human spirit deeply influences her approach to image-making. While initially studying psychology in university, she realized her true interests lay in celebrating the nuances of the human story rather than in parsing them, which began her shift towards visual work. She earned a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and and went on to study at Parson’s School of Design, where (many years later) she was invited to work as a guest lecturer.
Quamina-Woo's documentary work explores the transmogrified effects of trauma on communities often precipitated by the legacy of colonization, with explorative questions into the long term reverberations that these events can have within communities. Specifically, the ways in which collective suffering and its myriad embers can change the underlying ethos of groups to form something new; Adaptation not only as a means of survival but morphology that integrates and syncretizes with each culture. Nicky’s desire to examine these shifts is intrinsically linked to her ethnic heritage, whose parallels inspire her to dig deeper in search of human fortitude, compassion, and healing.
Nicky Quamina-Woo is the recipient of the Nikon-Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage award in 2020 as well as a Reuters Storytelling grant for her work on a Tanzania based project about the intersection of western medicine and witchcraft.
In her time as an independent her clients have included CNN, The Washington Post, Human Rights Watch, Reuter’s, Der Spiegel, Bloomberg, Apple, Reporters Beyond Borders, The Guardian, Vogue Italia, and Marie Claire magazines.
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“Untitled”
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Female farmer in Zanzibar, Tanzania
“Untitled”
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Woman moans as verses from the Holtay Quran are read near her in an attempt to help heal her physical body in Zanzibar, Tanzania
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“Untitled”
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Pilgrims gather in Lalibela, Ethiopia for their 3-day Christmas celebrations at the rock hewn churches.
Salem Al Qudwa
Salem Al Qudwa, who was born in 1976 to a Palestinian family in Benghazi, Libya (North Africa), returned to Gaza at the age of 21 to study architectural engineering at the Islamic University of Gaza. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. from the Oxford School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. In 2020 he moved to the US with his Palestinian-American family after being awarded a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School.
After reading the precis for the Inherit exhibit, I could not resist drafting the beautiful face of one of our African ancestors (Benin Bronze Memorial Head, Guinea Coast, Nigeria, Benin Kingdom, possibly mid-16th or early 17th century) and to write some words in Arabic inspired by the themes of his proposal. On the other hand, and in local Arabic, “Enta men dar/beit meen?” (which family/home are you from?), will be the first question that someone will ask you if she/he meets you for the first time. The Arabic word ‘dar’ or ‘beit’ means ‘house’. It is customary for people to be identified in everyday interactions by their family name and, in a more informal way, by their sheer physical resemblance to other members of their extended family. Home; as a physical place of family practices, is important in the Arabic culture and for uprooted people such as the Palestinians, extended family serves as an important institution critical in the survival of their culture.
Max Sansing, with Shani Crowe
One of Chicago’s most prolific and widely recognizable muralists, Max Sansing creates portraits of African Americans that celebrate both identity and the vibrant communities in which these subjects thrive. His distinct aesthetic features brightly colored works that often blend photorealism and abstraction, capturing intricately rendered faces set against dynamic backdrops that cast them as real-world heroes. A lifelong Chicagoan, born of two artistic parents, Sansing began making art as a young member of several graffiti crews before teaching himself oil-painting techniques and later completing formal training at the American Academy of Art. While he has painted Chicago icons from Barack Obama to Fred Hampton, Sansing also frequently creates works featuring Chicago youth as a testimony to their power and potential. In his two-decade-plus career, Sansing has received commissions to realize murals across the United States–in Boston, Miami, and Denver, among other cities.
Sansing is deeply committed to supporting his Chicago community and is involved with numerous youth programs that expand arts opportunities in underserved areas. In addition to painting full time, Sansing has expanded his creativity and artistic talents into creating and translating murals into electronic media as a graphic design artist. His influences include Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, Gustav Klimt, Thomas Blackshear, and his late father, Ellis Sansing. Max is the Co-Founder of RK Design, an art consulting group that specializes in mural and graphic design.
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SHANI CROWE is an interdisciplinary artist who received her BFA in film production from Howard University’s John H. Johnson School of Communications in 2011. Her work centers on cultural coiffure, adornment, and beauty ritual, as they relate to the diasporic African, and how these practices function as tools to foster connectivity. She is best known for creating intricate corn-rowed hairstyles, then capturing them as large photographic portraits.
Shani’s is part of the ensemble selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennale, her work and performances have been featured at the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA; on Saturday Night Live in collaboration with Solange Knowles; the Museum of Contemporary African and Diasporan Art (MoCADA), in Brooklyn, NY; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, in Grand Rapids, MI; Columbia University, in New York, NY; and Soho House Chicago. She lives and works on Chicago’s South Side.
Steve Y. Wanna
“The Sea Is Vast / And Time Passes”
Steve Wanna is an interdisciplinary sound and visual artist using science, philosophy, and comparative mythology to imagine possibilities for new beginnings. Spanning multiple media including music, sound design for dance collaborations, spatiotemporal installations and sculptures, photography, and works for mixed media, his art showcases the hidden, often ignored beauty he finds in chaotic and seemingly random phenomena. Abstract, experimental, and multimedia, and always centered on the human experience, his work is inspired by science and nature, often incorporating elements of controlled randomness— uncertainty is built into the process.
Born and raised in Lebanon, he immigrated to the US with his family as a teenager. He holds a doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Maryland. Wanna’s works have been presented at venues and galleries at home and abroad. Recent exhibitions include a 2-person show at the Delaware Contemporary title Inquiry: At The Intersection of Curiosity, which featured an installation of eight kinetic sound sculptures, and a solo show at Touchstone Gallery in Washington, DC. His multimedia, site-specific installation A Vast Expanse was selected for MoCA Arlington SOLOS 2023 and recently installed at the museum. Ferns, scrawned black, an outdoor sound installation was presented at the Kreeger Museum in Washington DC in 2024.
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I’m an experimental, abstract artist working across various media including sculpture, sound, video, and ​mixed-media and multi-sensory installations. My work blurs the lines between form and process, ideas and material, genre and experience, artist and perceiver.
I was born in a small border town in Lebanon at the start of a long civil war. Soon occupied, we were thrust into a world of non-belonging, rife with uncertainty and mistrust on all sides, a world of endless borders and checkpoints. I spent my childhood and teen years crossing local, national and international borders. It was often dehumanizing and always tinged with the threat of mortal danger—humans can become quite cruel in their misguided efforts to protect borders that, despite the stories we tell ourselves, are ultimately arbitrary. For me, borders signify human suffering and indignity, as do all the boundaries we manufacture to separate ourselves from others, personal borders we leverage as tools of oppression and hate.
​Despite all the uncertainty and daily loss and destruction I grew up with, life had to go on somehow. There was a cultural and experiential understanding of what could and could not be controlled. My art is born of experimentation and innovation, and is my attempt to erase borders and boundaries, whether in form, genre, or material, and to create some measure of order while embracing chaos and the potential beauty and joy that can paradoxically emerge from it. My approach, which is informed by the phenomenon of emergence as defined in systems theory and Buddhism, can be described as contained chaos—I create frameworks that allow processes to unfold autonomously and give rise to unplanned forms and systems. I make a clear distinction between chaos and disorder, and between containing and controlling chaos.
My formal training is in music composition and sound design, which has greatly influenced my visual practice. I create mixed media works and immersive, experiential, multisensory installations that transform spaces and create complete environments that transport the experiencer.
All borders are arbitrary.
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"The Sea is Vast
And Time Passes"
The Sea is Vast is an installation that speaks to the paradoxical feelings of anxiety and comfort that oppressed people everywhere feel in their everyday lives. The anxiety comes from daily hardships, while the comfort is that of the home and all that is familiar. The same locale can simultaneously function as home and a potential source of mortal danger. The uneasiness that ebbs and flows for people in such circumstances depends on a variety of factors and actions—I choose to focus on the sonic signatures that can engender opposite connotations: the sound of a jet engine for instance, can be associated with the danger of a fighter jet or the potential escape and travel promised by a passenger airplane.
At the center of the installation is a foreboding monolith, an intensely black, rectangular cuboid that is brightly lit from the inside but has only a single vertical slit running the entire height of it and from which the internal light can escape. Inside the monolith are speakers that emit the main sonic foundation of the installation, the sound of sea waves mixed with low rumbling. Visually, the monolith can be seen to represent a range of associations: the often-inescapable circumstances of ones life, the persistence of the human spirit, even under crushing hardship, the sheer, immovable weight of fate. The sound of sea waves, sometimes violently crashing, sometimes lilting and calming embody everything about the sea: the promise of escape, the perils of the journey, the unrelenting and unforgiving, harshness of the open sea that can seem utterly indifferent to the suffering of humans. Complementing this foundation are additional sonic layers coming from several speakers placed around the space, each representing a distinct set of associations and moods, but all related to the central idea of using sounds that can have diametrically opposed connotations (e.g. the sound of ships and foghorns, which can represent travel or signal danger). The space of the installation is generally uneasy but will range from calm to menacing, with occasional moments of nostalgia.
Taurean J. Webb
Creative Producer
Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D. is a filmmaker and scholar of race and religion. Much of his creative work and scholarship focus on the racial and religious dynamics embedded within transnational social movements—and the questions of “home,” “diaspora,” “loss,” and “care” that they inspire.
In January 2025, Webb hosted the final installation of his acclaimed art exhibit, "Ye Shall Inherit the Earth: A Portrait Ballad to Black-Palestine." "Inherit" brings together African Diasporic, Palestinian, and Lebanese visual artists who use portraiture-as-form (across 8 different artistic mediums) to reflect on the relationship between humanity and the sacred. Generously funded by the Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures and the Henry Luce Foundation, this exhibit will be on display from January 12-20, 2025, with an artist roundtable on January 19, 2025. All events will be held at Trinity United Church of Christ (Chicago, IL).
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Citation: Webb, Taurean J. “Ye Shall Inherit the Earth: A Portrait Ballad to Black-Palestine." SPIRIT HOUSE: A Crossroads Project. August 2025. Date Accessed. https://www.crossroads-spirithouse.org/webb.
Taurean J. Webb, Ph.D. is the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies in the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies (and the Social Transformation Research Collaborative) at DePaul University. A race studies scholar, religionist, and mixed-methods historian of ideas by training, Webb’s research interests are in Black internationalism, Afro-Arab transnationalism, African American religious history, futurism, Black Renaissance-era visual arts, and visual arts and religious metaphor within contemporary transnational social movements.
His published writing can be found in the Journal for Palestine Studies, Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy, Jadaliyya, and Black Perspectives—the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society.
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