ARTIST STATEMENT:

Coco Peila’s work confronts the histories, realities, and dreams of Black women and girls, using visual and musical storytelling through Hip Hop as a means of resistance and reclamation. Peila’s practice transforms pain into purpose and silence into voice. 

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Her latest visual piece embodies this ethos: a photograph of Peila as a girl child in a broken, scratched frame reflects vulnerability, resilience, and the intergenerational weight of oppression, while the abundant white space highlights absence, erasure, and the urgent need for protection.

 

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In this work, Peila presents God as a Black girl—an emblem of resistance, strength, and radical hope. She emphasizes that sexism and anti-Black racism experienced by Black women and girls, such as sexual violence, abuse and exploitation, physical abuse, domestic violence, adultification, and poverty, are often misinterpreted as personal failings—moral, economic, educational, or otherwise—rather than recognized as systemic.

 

Her work asserts that Black women and girls experience oppression at the intersection of sexism, anti-Black racism, and other social identities, and that centering their liberation disrupts entrenched hierarchies of power.

 

 

By placing Black women and girls at the center, Peila affirms that their protection and freedom are foundational to dismantling all systems of oppression. Through bold imagery, conceptual framing, and cultural specificity, her work challenges viewers to confront injustice while celebrating the brilliance, courage, and divinity of Black girls, positioning them as both the architects and embodiment of collective liberation.

 

 

Her latest release, a limited edition cassette tape called the TRIGGER WARNING mixtape, features this piece of visual art.​



 

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