Personal work commissioned by the Centre Pompidou’s Studio 13/16, the “first and only space in a French cultural institution with a programme of events designed exclusively for young people”. The Centre Pompidou is a major cultural institution in Paris, seeing over 180 million visitors since its opening in 1977.
This piece is called ‘Working Girl’. In this 1970s-inspired illustration, a Black woman sits at her desk, her expression revealing a sense of interruption, suggesting the constant intrusion upon her space in a patriarchal, white supremacist society. Yet she is self assured, reclaiming financial autonomy, and surrounded by symbols of traditionally male-dominated spaces. By reclaiming these symbols, she shows her resilience against systemic inequalities, her self empowerment, and her refusal to pander to respectability politics.