Lazarus Ball

Lazarus Ball (2024–2026)

Lazarus Ball is not protest art. It is testimony. It is the record of what was done and who was lost while the powerful looked away or enabled destruction.

The biomorphic figures that move through this work — sprites, souls, witnesses — have lived in the artist’s hand since the late 1980s. They are presences that carry the dead. They name the unnamed. They refuse erasure with the same stubbornness as the artist who made them.

Structured as four books — Book of the Heart, Book of the Dead, Book of the Sky, Book of the Night — the series moves across registers of grief, witness, and indictment.

The Book of the Dead holds Gaza: two years of deliberate destruction, engineered deprivation, and the systematic targeting of civilians while institutions, governments, celebrities, and heads of state watched in silence. The Book of the Night maps the mechanisms of systemic oppression and surveillance, and acknowledges the lives caught in their wake.

A woman called Good, executed. Children marked with X’s. Souls rendered in gold on black, insisting on their own luminosity.

The Complicit catalogs a crowd of witnesses who chose silence. They all had eyes. The dollar signs embedded in their bodies answer why they stayed quiet. Kompromat maps the architecture of power that makes complicity possible — predators in paradise, the innocent crossed out, the machinery of control rendered in Caribbean color so bright it looks like celebration.

This work did not begin with politics. It began with loss — specific, preventable, and personal. A brother who committed suicide by an insomnia drug branded as Halcion whose dangers were not made known to the public. A mother who died in corporate elder care, over-medicated, malnourished when Medicare Advantage wrote her off rather than rehabilitating her. What the artist came to understand, painting through grief, is that the mechanisms that kill are the same whether the victim is a child in Gaza, an elder in a corporate facility, a young man failed by a captured regulatory system, or a woman named Good who deserved to live.

Corruption is not a metaphor in this work. It is a cause of death.

Lazarus Ball is a record of what was done —to a family, to a people, to a planet —by systems that depend on silence. It is rage made visible. It is grief that refused complicity. It is an insistence that the dead be seen and the living be held accountable.

- February, 2026