Taste Of Trayvon Martin
This piece began from sitting with the death of Trayvon Martin and the emotional impact his story continued to carry within me years later. What affected me most was the humanity within it all and the realization that before the headlines, protests, and national conversations, there was simply a young Indigenous American boy existing within an ordinary moment of life.
At the center of the composition sits the Arizona drink, something that became deeply symbolic in connection to Trayvon’s death. I painted his birth and death dates directly onto the can because I wanted it to exist as more than an object. It became a marker of innocence interrupted. A simple everyday item transformed into a lasting symbol tied to memory, grief, and collective reflection.
Throughout the canvas, fragmented images of Trayvon appear across different moments of his life. Some images carry youth and softness, while others carry the emotional weight of what followed after his death. The repetition became important to me because it reflects how his image continues resurfacing within the collective consciousness, never fully disappearing. The guns layered throughout the composition create tension within the piece. They are not placed to glorify violence, but to reflect the overwhelming presence of fear, danger, and systemic trauma surrounding indigenous existence in America. Their repetition almost feels unavoidable, pressing inward from every direction.
As I worked through the painting, it became personal for me as well. I found myself thinking about vulnerability, identity, and how easily innocence can become politicized once tragedy enters the conversation. The piece pushed me to reflect on how certain deaths reshape not only public history, but also the internal emotional reality of those who witness them from a distance.
The intense red throughout the piece represents the bloodshed connected to Trayvon’s death. I wanted the color to feel emotionally unavoidable moving through the composition like grief, pain, anger, and memory existing all at once. The red does not settle because emotionally, the loss itself still does not feel settled. Through collage and abstraction, I wanted this work to feel less like documentation and more like emotional residue, the lingering weight left behind when a life becomes both deeply personal and publicly symbolic.
In that way, the painting became not only a reflection of Trayvon Martin’s death, but also a reflection of my own attempt to process what that loss continues to mean within myself and within the world around me.
At the center of the composition sits the Arizona drink, something that became deeply symbolic in connection to Trayvon’s death. I painted his birth and death dates directly onto the can because I wanted it to exist as more than an object. It became a marker of innocence interrupted. A simple everyday item transformed into a lasting symbol tied to memory, grief, and collective reflection.
Throughout the canvas, fragmented images of Trayvon appear across different moments of his life. Some images carry youth and softness, while others carry the emotional weight of what followed after his death. The repetition became important to me because it reflects how his image continues resurfacing within the collective consciousness, never fully disappearing. The guns layered throughout the composition create tension within the piece. They are not placed to glorify violence, but to reflect the overwhelming presence of fear, danger, and systemic trauma surrounding indigenous existence in America. Their repetition almost feels unavoidable, pressing inward from every direction.
As I worked through the painting, it became personal for me as well. I found myself thinking about vulnerability, identity, and how easily innocence can become politicized once tragedy enters the conversation. The piece pushed me to reflect on how certain deaths reshape not only public history, but also the internal emotional reality of those who witness them from a distance.
The intense red throughout the piece represents the bloodshed connected to Trayvon’s death. I wanted the color to feel emotionally unavoidable moving through the composition like grief, pain, anger, and memory existing all at once. The red does not settle because emotionally, the loss itself still does not feel settled. Through collage and abstraction, I wanted this work to feel less like documentation and more like emotional residue, the lingering weight left behind when a life becomes both deeply personal and publicly symbolic.
In that way, the painting became not only a reflection of Trayvon Martin’s death, but also a reflection of my own attempt to process what that loss continues to mean within myself and within the world around me.