Museum purchase and gift of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation
Description
Bailey’s Pyramid, made in honor of a woman he had known who died, triangulates among a variety of practices associated with found-object—inlaid funeral jugs and vases. Encrusted with small quartzlike stones, costume jewelry, and pennies, the pyramid’s layers of meanings bring together more clearly than any other work his uses of African-based grave treatments, liberation theology, beliefs in fate, the study of Freemasonry, and covert Egyptianism.