Pregnant Women

Young viewed pregnant women as a source of future salvation and painted them frequently throughout his lifetime. About pregnant women he said, “The way I feel about it, they all giving birth to angels. They giving birth to a new nation, they gonna start us a new kingdom.” However, he also said that pregnant women represented “some of the problems I see in the city.”

He would often render them isolated within a mountainscape, which Young equated with freedom. He sanctified many of these women with wings and haloes while another is tethered by the mundane, carrying laundry on her head. “I just paint pregnant women because it’s something I admire. When I was a boy, I remember my mother and I was kind of ashamed to walk aside my mother. I grew up, I forgot about all that, you know. I feel like the pregnant women, creating me, creating all of us, so I put that in my art.”

All works Untitled and ca. 1980-1999