Blue Benediction and Matriarch: Labor of Love continue DeJeonge Reese's series The Family Altar: Relics of the Black Church, using cyanotypes made from family photographs to explore how memory, faith, and history are preserved through the things we keep.

In Blue Benediction, cyanotype fragments and lace form a new kind of family archive, while Matriarch: Labor of Love honors the generations of women who have held families together through birth, care, prayer, and sacrifice. Burlap evokes the physical and emotional labor of that love, while the deep blue of the cyanotype carries associations with spirituality, the blues, and Black histories preserved through textiles, photographs, and storytelling.

Together, the works consider what we inherit, what we carry, and what we choose to preserve: fragments of a much larger family story.

MATRIARCH, 2026

35 x 27 in

Cyanotype scraps & burlap

NFS