Untitled (Cotton Pickers)

In Untitled (Cotton Pickers), Rico Gatson creates a foundational image based on a historical black-and-white photograph of enslaved field workers harvesting cotton, which he then repeated, rotated, and distorted. The background imagery is overlaid with an array of bright “spotlights” in green, red, yellow, orange, and black, colors associated with Pan African emblems and ideology. By obscuring portions of the underlying imagery with geometric shapes, Gatson pushes the viewer to look more closely at the background details and activity, encouraging a deliberative consideration of the people and events of our past.