“Colored” is a word that once attempted to define us.
To group. To flatten. To simplify.
It failed.
Blackness has never existed as a singular experience, a single tone, a single narrative. It expands, contracts, shifts, and resists containment. This series exists within that tension—between what was named and what cannot be named.
Through monochromatic studies, each work isolates a single hue—not to confine Blackness, but to observe how it moves within constraint. Color becomes both filter and lens. What emerges is not uniformity, but nuance: subtle shifts of emotion, posture, and presence.
This body of work is structured as a collection. Each piece is an entry. A document. A moment captured and preserved, not explained.
I began this series as a way of slowing down my own process of seeing—of questioning how identity is framed, perceived, and remembered. Not as a statement of conclusion, but as an act of observation.
This is not a definition of Blackness.
Our blackness cannot be defined.
It is a study.
An observation of the beauty our colors hold.
Entry No. 1 begins here.
— Xavier London