The Story Behind Blue Ridge Sunset

I am a Black woman who loves the mountains.

I say that plainly because it still feels like a statement. Like something that needs to be said out loud, put somewhere, made visible. Because when you picture someone standing at a mountain overlook, hands in their pockets, just taking it all in, that person doesn't usually look like me.

But I have always loved the mountains. The Blue Ridge specifically. The way the ridgeline stacks itself into the distance, blue layered on blue, going softer and quieter the further back it goes. The way the sky at golden hour bleeds into something warm and slow. The way everything just stops for a minute and lets you breathe.

That feeling is what I painted.

The Blue Ridge Mountains are ancient. Among the oldest in the world, they have been home to Indigenous peoples, including the Cherokee, for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. The land holds that depth in everything, the weathered ridgelines, the layered mist, the way it feels like it has been here longer than anything you can name.

Black history is woven into these mountains too, quieter and less told. Freedom seekers used the Appalachian terrain as cover on the Underground Railroad. Black communities settled in the hollows and hillsides after emancipation, farming and building lives in the shadow of those ridges. And yet when the Blue Ridge Parkway was built in the 1930s, Black visitors were met with segregated facilities, welcome to look at the same mountains but not to rest beside them equally.

That history doesn't disappear. It lives in the land. And it makes the act of standing there, taking it in, feeling at home in it, mean something more.

Blue Ridge Sunset came from a real and personal love for that landscape. But it also came from something I couldn't ignore: the near-total absence of Black people in the visual story we tell about nature. About hiking, about mountain towns, about standing somewhere beautiful and just being at peace with it.

We are out there. I am out there. And we deserve to be in the painting too.
Not as a statement. Not as a correction. Just as the truth of who gets to love the land and find rest in it. Black women included. Black women especially.

This piece is my place in that landscape. Quiet, golden, and completely mine.

Blue Ridge Sunset is currently on view in the Au exhibition at Golden Belt Arts in Durham through March 31. You can also find it in my portfolio at sanbcreative.com.