Still Here: A Twenty-One Gun Salute

Medium: Porcelain ceramic
Dimensions: 13” × 8” × 8”
Year: 2026
Photography by: David Gary Lloyd

Still Here: A Twenty-One Gun Salute draws from histories of racial violence and systemic erasure in the United States, including the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres. Across these events, prosperous Black communities were targeted and destroyed, their homes burned, their economies dismantled, and their histories systematically suppressed or excluded from dominant narratives.

In this work, the ceremonial language of the twenty-one gun salute—traditionally a gesture of national honor—is reimagined as an offering to those lives and communities that were never formally mourned by the state. Encased within a glass vessel, porcelain firearms accumulate in dense formation, their delicate surfaces rendering them inert, fragile, and suspended in time. Removed from function, these forms become relics, echoes of violence that persist as material memory rather than active force.

The glass jar operates as both archive and containment, recalling systems that preserve history while simultaneously restricting its movement and visibility. It evokes the ways Black histories are often held—collected, studied, and displayed—yet still confined within institutional boundaries that shape how they are remembered and understood.

Within this enclosed space, two birds appear as subtle yet persistent presences. Rather than symbols of escape, they inhabit the same constrained environment, suggesting forms of survival that exist within, rather than beyond, structures of control. They bear witness to what remains.

Still Here: A Twenty-One Gun reflects on the enduring aftermath of racial violence in America—how memory accumulates in fragments, how absence becomes a form of presence, and how, despite systemic attempts at erasure, Black life continues to persist, endure, and bear witness across generations.