What the Crop Still Carries extends bryant’s ongoing exploration of agricultural materials as living archives, materials that bear the weight of history while holding the possibility of transformation. Centering cotton, a crop inseparable from the extraction, violence, and forced labor that shaped Black life in the United States, the work confronts a material that underwrote both personal histories and the global cotton economy that long structured the Mid-South, where his family is from.

This sculptural painting will be unveiled in March as part of Open Inquiry: UC Arts at the Sausalito Center for the Arts.