Yemanja and Her Osprey

2019, 59”L x 60”W, hand-dyed cotton fabric, machine-quilted, hand-embellished.

This is one of the Birds Are My People series, Inspired by my time as the artist in residence at the Audubon Birds of Prey Center in Maitland, FL. I draw the birds there every week. The birds in the Center that stay and are not rehabilitated for release in the wild become my models as Bird Ambassadors. I think of the osprey as the familiar of Yemanja, who is the West African goddess of the sea. There are tiny seed beads in his feathers and her hair. The shells are from New Smyrna Beach, FL, that I collected during our time living there.

The image of Yemanja’s face and hands is a stone lithograph, printed on fabric. I made the lithograph at Charles Criner’s studio in Houston, TX. The holes in the shells are naturally formed by snails who eat the mollusk inside.