School Lunch engages the history of the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children Program, a radical act of community care that emerged in the late 1960s to combat food insecurity and systemic neglect. While the program provided essential nourishment to thousands of children across the U.S., it was met with aggressive state backlash—including a 1969 incident in which Chicago police raided a serving site and urinated on the food. This piece responds directly to that moment, drawing from both the aesthetics of school lunch and the broader visual language of Black resistance.

Each element in the composition speaks to this layered history. The basketball at center is stylized to resemble an orange, referencing fruit commonly distributed at the breakfasts. A milk carton along the edge spells out MLK, evoking both Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and the complex relationship between civil rights, state power, and the radical politics of care. The meal itself is reconstructed through my own lexicon of symbols: a curving squiggle topped with a yellow Blackamoor head becomes a stand-in for scrambled eggs; a zigzag motif, rendered in Memphis-inspired forms and overlaid in triplicate, takes on the appearance of bacon. Even the panther is reimagined—its head replaced with one of my recurring feline figures, superimposed onto the familiar silhouette of the Black Panther Party’s logo.

Together, these gestures examine how symbols of care and defiance can be abstracted, remixed, and recharged. This work reflects on the ways nourishment—both literal and symbolic—has been central to liberation struggles, and how the aesthetics of food, memory, and resistance can converge in the act of reimagining history.