These two limited-edition lithographs have been produced in conjunction with

Paulo Nazareth’s Summer 2022 exhibition, STROKE. Reward depicts an illustration of an enslaved man. This same illustration was used on reward posters, which were distributed during the American Civil War to find runaway slaves. By mass-printing this image, Nazareth reminds us that neo-colonialism is ongoing. Chocolat is both the name of the second print and the stage name of Rafael Padilla, a clown who performed in a Parisian circus around the 1900s. One of the earliest successful Black entertainers in France, Padilla, an Afro-Cuban, was the first Black clown to play a lead role in a circus pantomime act. Prior to his success, he was treated like a slave (despite technically ceasing to be one the moment he set foot on European soil), having been sold to a Spanish businessman named Patricio Castaño Capetillo for eighteen ounces of gold by his mother, who was enslaved in Cuba.