Sojourner Truth Parsons Peaceful witness of sorrow III, 2023

With their intermingling bright colors, silhouetted bodies, and black fields doubling as architectural markers and framing devices, Parsons' paintings have an astounding atmospheric intensity. Her compositions hover at the threshold of abstraction and representation, swinging back and forth as recognizable shapes such as bodies, flowers, city blocks or landscapes never fully settle in one register or the other. Sometimes the association with the outside world is anchored simply by a luminous round disc—sun or moon—that lets the painting shift at the blink of an eye. Or gentle slopes and upturned curves can suddenly manifest their eroticism before retreating again into a compositional whole of abstracted pattern. 

Composed from overlapping elements—layers of paint alternate with thin washes, matt surfaces with slightly glossier and iridescent passages—the artist’s iconography constructs an interior environment, more psychic landscape than forest or city block, embodying emotional truth.

Compositional structure and color have a wider significance in Parsons’ practice. As the artist noted in 2022, “I find edges really beautiful. When I’m experiencing the world, I can’t help but see everything as an edge, as a color next to a texture next to a flatness. And as a white-passing person of color, that ‘edgeness’ has been part of the way that I’ve moved through the world interpersonally, my whole life. On an edge.“