On Kinship, Conflict and the Ghosts of Revolution
In BASTARDS OF THE PARTY (2024), I draw from the Yoruba tradition of Ibeji—divine twins who symbolize balance, protection, and sacred blessing—to reimagine two of the most charged figures in modern Black America: the Blood and the Crip. Dressed in opposing bandanas—red and blue—the mirrored figures are not rendered in conflict, but in quiet symmetry. They do not war. They witness.
This sculpture is a direct invocation of Cle “Bone” Sloan’s 2007 documentary Bastards of the Party, where Sloan, himself a former gang member, uncovers the buried roots of L.A.’s gang culture. The story he tells is not about innate criminality—it’s about lineage. What we call gang culture today began as grassroots efforts to preserve community in the face of deep betrayal. Sloan traces the Crips and Bloods to the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—movements dismantled by assassination, infiltration, and imprisonment.
The gangs, he argues, are the “bastard offspring of the Black Panther Party”. These were the children of freedom fighters—now leaderless, disillusioned, and increasingly criminalized. What began as collectives of care and neighborhood protection gradually devolved into deadly conflict, fueled by the infiltration of drugs, militarized policing, and a government complicit in Black demise.
BASTARDS OF THE PARTY resists the easy vilification of Black youth caught in this cycle. It rejects the lazy pathologizing of our children and instead forces a deeper interrogation. Too often we respond without question, absorbing the dominant narrative as truth. But what if we remembered differently?
By casting the Crip and Blood as twin orishas, I invoke sacred memory to reframe how we see them. Stripping away the violence and racist clichés, they are re-cast as divine children—fractured, yes, but not beyond repair. Their opposition is an illusion; their unity, a radical and necessary possibility.
Their attire furthers this vision. Traditionally, Ibeji are adorned in custom twin garments—often made of Aṣọ-Oke or richly dyed cloth—crafted to honor their unity and divine stature. In some cases, a single shared tunic is fashioned for both figures, symbolizing their metaphysical bond. In this sculpture, I reimagine that sacred cloak using materials charged with contemporary meaning: the red and blue bandanas of the Bloods and Crips. Their combination, stitched into a single twin-wrapper, becomes a bold meditation on belonging and rupture—on what it means to be forever linked, even through strife.
But the work also gestures back further—across oceans and time—to an older dislocation: the rupture of the transatlantic slave trade. BASTARDS… lives in the long shadow of that original displacement. It reflects how, even centuries later, the legacies of broken kinship, lost lineage, and severed memory manifest in contemporary ways. Gang signs become new languages of belonging. Bandanas become tribal markers. In the absence of remembered ancestry, we form new bloodlines.
The materiality of the sculpture—its quiet elegance, its spiritual stillness—deliberately opposes the chaos often associated with gang culture. There is no gunfire here. No violence. Only stillness. Stillness, in this case, is radical. It is a refusal to perform pain. It is a space of reverence. They become shrines, rather than statistics. The transparent material of the figures read as spirit bodies—ethereal, neither fully here nor gone—pointing to the spectral presence of so many young Black lives lost to intra-communal violence and that of African ancestral legacy that connects and revives.
BASTARDS OF THE PARTY is both prayer and provocation. A memorial and a mirror. It holds space for mourning while making a case for redemption. And in doing so, it also becomes an indictment. Not of the boys caught in the spiral of street life—but of the systems that constructed the spiral. The government conspiracies that introduced drugs into our neighborhoods. The policies that fuel mass incarceration. The surveillance programs that crushed our movements. The cultural machinery that glamorizes our destruction while criminalizing our pain.
This piece refuses that narrative. It says: look again. These boys are not your enemy. They are what’s left of a dream deferred—and they may yet be the key to a dream renewed.
Through the sacred lens of Ibeji, I offer a vision beyond rivalry. I offer memory. I offer possibility. What was broken may be remembered. What was orphaned may yet be claimed.
BASTARDS OF THE PARTY asks us not simply to witness, but to re-member—and in doing so, to reclaim what this world would rather we forget: the divine in ourselves, and each other.