Birth of Ceiba
2004 (Ink and Felts)
My pregnancy progressed and by my 8th month I was in pure creative bliss. As the days approached our birth, my partner and I began cooking food to freeze. He painted our whole Bronx studio apartment with murals of trees, and I climbed on top of our window sill holding on with one arm while the other painted a mural of the sun on the ceiling for Ceiba to look at. By this time I was having regular conversations with our child in the womb, and this image is the representation of those conversations. While I would commute from one end of the Bronx via 2 subways to another tip of Brooklyn (a 2 hr commute) I would pull out my pens and paper and work on this image. Ceiba is named after the Ceiba tree. A tree that inspired the love in my partnership, but that dates back to our ancestors on both lines. In this drawing I am presenting Ceiba my daughter to the ancestral Ceiba who we all travel through, as its believed in various Maya and African traditions. Ceiba’s grow around the ecuator and is sacred and useful to many ancient cultures around the globe.
