Twelve Apostles features a swarm of doubled figures—chimeric bodies composed of alligator forms, each bearing two heads: one drawn from Blackamoor iconography, the other stylized into a flat-top fade, a haircut deeply associated with Black youth culture of the 1980s and ’90s. The repetition of these creatures across the composition generates both visual rhythm and symbolic density, conjuring a sense of movement, myth, and spiritual charge.

The title invokes the biblical Twelve Apostles—figures chosen to witness, carry, and disseminate radical teachings. Here, that legacy is abstracted and reimagined: these apostles don’t walk upright, but slither, crawl, and accumulate, their bodies loaded with the visual residue of colonial imagery and Black self-styling. They speak to a different kind of gospel—one encoded in memory, mutation, and inheritance.

The use of the alligator is especially resonant within Southern Black culture, where the animal appears as both predator and protector, feared and respected. From folklore and blues lyrics to racialized histories of spectacle and survival, the alligator holds complex symbolic weight. In Twelve Apostles, it becomes a vessel for transformation—a stand-in for the slipperiness of Black identity, for what can’t be tamed, pinned down, or easily interpreted.

Set against a deep, saturated blue and framed by zigzagging edges, this work extends my broader exploration of repetition, doubling, and coded abstraction. These apostles are not disciples in the traditional sense—they are carriers of contradiction, hybrid guardians of a lineage that refuses to flatten itself into clarity.