Throughout popular visual culture, Myers sees images of Black women in mourning serve as the ghost or palimpsest of the image of Black bodies in pain or dead Back bodies....
Throughout popular visual culture, Myers sees images of Black women in mourning serve as the ghost or palimpsest of the image of Black bodies in pain or dead Back bodies. Be it Emmett Till’s mother, Coretta Scott King with tears pulling down her cheek, or the Mothers of the Movement, Black women have come to serve as some sort of continual American Pieta. The artist finds parallels between this iconography and the spectral mourning mother figure of La Llorona from Latin America and the Southwestern United States, who weeps endlessly for her children. The varied tellings of this tale all recount the ghost haunting waterfront areas, searching for the children who she drowned. She serves as a metaphor for the loss of life and culture during the colonization of the Indigenous communities of these geographies.