Julian V.L. Gaines: Fly in the Sugar Bowl examines the tensions between Black experience and systemic inequality through painting, sculpture, and assemblage. The title — drawn from Thomas J. Lax, Greg Tate, and a traditional folk song — metaphorizes Black existence within white-dominant society: influential yet excluded, insider and outsider simultaneously. Wooden doors bearing Jim Crow–era signage confront the present with segregation's material remnants; a bullet-riddled, backlit reproduction of the Emmett Till memorial marker indexes ongoing acts of historical erasure; the JET BLACK series reworks mid-century Jet Magazine imagery to reclaim Black cultural representation as self-authorship.
