Unique: The Light Within (or Unique’s Shining Light) (2024)

Title

Unique: The Light Within (or Unique’s Shining Light) (2024)

Artist

El Mac, in collaboration with Aise Born and Aniekan Udofia

Details

Aerosol enamel and acrylic on concrete

Location

Side of the Department of Housing HQ, 2018 Shannon Place SE (2000 block of Martin Luther King Ave, SE)

Visual description

A girl, modeled on a student at Savoy Elementary School, cups her hands in front of her, light seemingly radiating from them. Her face and hands have contoured lines, rather like a relief map. Behind her, a large mandala floats in the air with clouds in a blue sky in the background and a blue stretch that is presumably the Anacostia River (which is in fact located about a quarter mile behind the mural). 

Interpretive Notes: The little girl’s cupped hands, held together and almost floating in air, seem to radiate light that appears to be her internal spiritual essence or inner light, which is refracted outward in the shape of a great surrounding mandala, a complex geometric configuration that in diverse Asian religions may be a map of the spiritual universe or an aid to meditation, enabling dynamic movement between inner and outer spiritual domains.

Although the imagery is reminiscent of mandala offerings in Tibetan Buddhism, the artist may in particular be influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, in which the mandala form is understood as the spark of individual creativity, connecting to symbolic archetypes in the collective unconscious.

Artist’s Note

About the work, El Mac has said that when he visited Anacostia to meet local artists and photograph local kids for inspiration and reference images for the mural, he met one four-year-old girl in particular who was especially radiant and self-possessed. Her name was Unique, and she became the basis of the design for the mural. El Mac explains, “I wanted to convey the sense that this little girl and so many other young folks like her, regardless of any humble beginnings all carry a spark of divinity within, and with it the power and potential to change the world.”

Prompts for closer looking

1. What does the artist accomplish through the drawn relief lines on the subject’s face, hands and clothing? Are these lines of energy coursing through the child, being made manifest in the mandala behind her?   If the mandala is a “map” of the cosmos, do the relief lines on the girl help map the contours of her interior mind and soul?

2. Why has the artist chosen to depict the girl in black and white, while the mandala and skyscape behind are in vibrant colors?  Are we witnessing the process of imagination in action, in which the child’s interior potential is being externalized through creative thought, enlivening and colorizing the world around her?

3. What, or who, do you think the girl is looking at? Is she connecting with those who walk by and look at her? What happens to you as you gaze into her eyes?