“In broad daylight” is a phrase that speaks to the brazen-ness of an offence. To commit a criminal act in prime time, when it can be fully seen and witnessed, often confounds and produces an adamant disbelief. Strachan’s proclivity for playing with double meaning is reflected in the exhibition’s title through his interpretation of the phrase as a revelation of fundamental truths; a nod to an old wives’ tale, “sunlight being the best medicine.” In this exhibition, Strachan explores this duality through a new series of life-size sculptures based on the theme of the Madonna and Child.

Each of Strachan’s mother figures, ostensibly Black Madonnas, holds up her violently quieted son; the poses in and of themselves poignant, suggesting through their gestures various approaches to the egregious circumstances of losing a child. They articulate genres of staying power and fortitude in the unfortunate yet likely event that some other Black mother might be called to a similar duty, to diffuse and negotiate civic anger while managing personal heartache. Alice Nokuzola “Mamcethe” Biko stands with poetic grace, determined to keep upright the sagging body of her son, Bantu Stephen Biko. Kadiatou Diallo, the mother of Amadou Diallo, is confidently seated, even poised, as her son is seemingly at rest in her lap. Rounding out Strachan’s sculptural triptych, made from the same Carrara marble as that used by Michelangelo, is Louise Little, in a meditative, devotional stance, eyes slightly downcast and palms up, with her son, Malcolm X, strewn across her legs.

Unlike routine sculptural forms of heroes which represent a notable (often European male) subject in action or at least in command of the occasion, Strachan’s are doubly weighted in an opposing direction, 1) towards Black male figures who have a complex relation to the heroic event (with neither military nor political status); and 2) towards the Black women who bore them and who continued to bear the traumatic legacy of their lives.

It was asked by Alice Walker in her groundbreaking 1972 essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” She writes, “What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? In our great grandmothers’ day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.” (2) Strachan’s collaboration with his mother coupled with his insistence on rendering heroic versions of not just Malcolm X, Bantu Stephen Biko, and Amadou Diallo, but also their mothers; making monuments to them as well as to their noted sons, might be interpreted as a response to Walker’s question by a Black artist who knows and appreciates how his creative acumen and his mother’s intertwine. “I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers,” writes the poet Audre Lorde (3). In Broad Daylight asks the audience to consider the lives of these men through the quieted, but stalwart, agencies (creative, intellectual, nurturing, tactical) of their mothers, all common enough Black women, who had to manage the anger and secrets that evolve from the societal limits that have historically predetermined that position.