Eat The Meat. Leave the Bones.
Exhibition dates: August 25 - 29, 2025
Closing reception: Thursday, August 28th, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Grip Hold Grab, Acrylic and Spray Paint on Canvas, 2025
Scipio, Acrylic and Spray Paint on Canvas, 2025
Phantom Bride, Oil on Panel, 2025
Artist Statement
When Katana King spoke to her mother, Jacqueline Carter, about the sadness that comes from feeling misunderstood and misrepresented, her mother would often say “eat the meat, leave the bones”, advising her daughter to take the pieces of critique that resonate and leave the rest. For King, a Caribbean-American, this quote paralleled not only her moments of confidence, throwing bones over her shoulder, but also days she felt the world had eaten her up –leaving a pile of bones. Mary-Frances Winters, diversity and equity consultant and fellow North Carolinian, coined the term “Black Fatigue” as an “underlying syndrome of sorts that permeates my very being”. The CDC confirms structural racism and the stress resulting as a public health threat with the ability to cause lifelong damage to the body and brain. Often spanning the entirety of one’s life, Black Fatigue persists as a marginalized, invisible, and systemic harm. In Eat the Meat. Leave the Bones, King tackles her experience with hypervisibility and invisibility, being both overpoliced and overlooked. Combining traditional oil paint, acrylic paint, airbrushed applications, and digital painting, King uses multi-media and self-portraiture to give representation to her struggles with Black Fatigue while coming of age in predominantly white institutions.