Choose Joy

“Choose Joy” by Brittney S. Price 30x30” Acrylic on stretched canvas

Black hand reaching for fruit personified as joy. The ancient Ghanian symbol of Sankofa, (meaning you must know your past to walk into your future) adorns the sky, alluding to ancestral omnipresence.

“When given the prompt "acts of resistance" in relation to the Black experience in America, I looked into the full history of the Black American. There is brilliance yes, but also the resilience against injustice from yesterday's slavery to today's brutality. I tapped into the pain, the inequities, the prejudice... And I thought to myself how? How can a people survive in an environment so toxic? In a climate with systems in place directly for their harm? What is it that produces the fortitude to withstand such cruelties?

To not only survive atrocities but to thrive with both style and grace. The answer came to me in a negro spiritual, (negro spirituals were songs often sang by slaves in plantation fields as a distraction from laborious work and to keep pace to avoid beatings for low production yields). The songs use themes of hope and a brighter tomorrow to remind the enslaved of the glory that awaits them. That glory is freedom. The power is held in the ability to see beyond the circumstance; to actively seek and "Choose Joy! I can not think of a more powerful act of resistance.” - Brittney S. Price