It Came as a Joyous Daybreak

It Came as a Joyous Daybreak, 2023. Light projection facing Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue on the façade of The Vault Warehouse, Long Beach, CA. 54 x 106”
Sponsored by The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; in partnership with 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica, CA;
and the MRH Fund for Artists, Southern California; with additional support from The Vault Warehouse, Long Beach, CA.
With special thanks also extending to Long Beach Arts Council for the nomination, and to Janie Nowell and Oliver Krisch for their encouragement and support.


It Came as a Joyous Daybreak serves as a call to solidarity within our communities and neighborhoods, for the sake of the children. The title is captured from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, wherein he envisions children playing together in freedom. This work was made in prayer for the innocent.

As we witness the world crumbling from conflict, greater becomes our responsibility to offer light wherever there is darkness by teaching, speaking, and living peace. This project hearkens to a hope for freedom and peaceful co-existence, as we contemplate how we can assertively bring more peace into life.

Two historical photographs are interwoven here—African American Child with Parasol, photographed during the 1950s by the late Charles Teenie Harris, a photojournalist from Pittsburg, PA; and my mother on the day of her first communion, taken by an unknown photographer in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam in the 1960s, almost a decade before she and her family fled a war-torn Việt Nam, soon arriving at a refugee camp in Indiantown Gap, PA, just years before settling in Harrisburg, PA where I was born. In sisterhood, they stand on common ground, offering light to our neighbors.

This project speaks on our shared histories of migration, our stand for equality, our plea for justice, and our desire for healing. It encounters us in a place wherein intimate stories of struggle, survival, and perseverance are shared among all of humanity, and at the point at which history, art, and light intersect.

“The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.” -Romans 13:12

Lyrics to song referenced: Top Rankin’ (1979) by Bob Marley and the Wailers