Stripping the maritime alphabet of its primary colors and replacing them with muted browns and blacks, Mourning/Warning highlights the relationship of Americans of the African diaspora to water, maritime trade, and the need for an alternate means of communication in times of emergency and duress. How do you send a warning call that hatred comes constantly in waves?

M/W serves as a method of memorializing the slain and wronged, and of teaching our children and ourselves to be vigilant and wary in hostile terrain, where your skin color makes you an easy target.

The names of the victims of police brutality, unsolved murders, violence motivated by homophobia and transphobia with missing individuals like Phoenix Coldon fill this edition. John Robinson represents the victims whose murders go unsolved and seemingly forgotten for decades. For too many, justice remains distant.

M/W 2 consists of numerical and repeater, or substitute, flags that compliment the alternative alphabetic flags of the abecedarian M/W 1. The repeaters make character duplication possible. In this case, they illustrate patterns of pain, grief, humiliation.

Conceived in Newport, Rhode Island and completed in New Haven, Connecticut, M/W 2 was digitally printed in Josefin Sans typeface.

All proceeds from this publication will be donated to the Innocence Project New Orleans, National Bail Out & Ujimaa Medics.