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“I had the privilege of being a Bok resident at the Maitland Art Center from January to March of 2026. I produced two paintings during my time, experiencing Winter move into early Spring. Permeating the space, I felt a quiet mandate to be in creative contemplation as I crossed the garden to the studio each morning, And in Andre’s marks inscribed upon the concrete. Such an impression rests now in me.” - Mary W.D. Graham. Mary W.D. Graham is a Philadelphia born interdisciplinary artist with a social practice background employing painting, performance, and installation. Through her work she engages the practical means of achieving Black liberation through the investigation of history, and the process of attaining and embodying freedom. Through an abstract expressionist performance practice informed by her classical and jazz vocal trainings, she renders improvisational song performances to respond to moment and place. Graham’s painting follows a tradition of Black representational portraiture as she depicts her own ancestors, historical individuals, and fictive subjects. Graham’s portrait series Value Test: Brown Paper depicts Black women painted on brown paper bags and directly addresses the “paper bag test.” With origins in slavery and white supremacy, the “test” was a form of skin-color-based exclusion employed intra communally within the Black American upper class between the Reconstruction era and the 1980s in the United States. Encountering “the paper bag test” and a Black colloquialism, Graham felt an impulse to create a visual technology for continuing a process of inter-generational healing linked to a meditation on her own origins. Referencing photo-collage for proportional and light, Graham paints her fictional subjects on oil using classical techniques to emphasize skin luminosity and depth of expression to spark recognition and reflection