Jalynn McDuffey’s artist’s statement: When beginning my work, I began to ask why black people are rarely portrayed in portraiture. I began to research many portraits: many hidden, covered in negative implications or the subject is unnamed. I worked around the question of what a portrait of a black person would look like in modern day. I wanted to create not just a figure but has a personal attachment, instead of an object that can be changed. I studied how the style, materials, and objects in a portrait determine the importance of the person, occupation, status, etc. I made a second part of my question how the oppression of blacks throughout history affects the identity of a person, and how this can be portrayed.