Papay Solomon knew the mutability of borders even before he was born. Carried out of Liberia by his pregnant mother during that country’s calamitous civil war, he spent the majority of his childhood in a refugee camp in nearby Guinea, where many Liberians spent the 1990s navigating between a fractured past and an uncertain future. It was in the camp that he first learned to paint, inspired by a baroque collection of donated illustrated children’s Bibles and burned DVDs of American Christmas films. The material deficiencies made him unusually sensitive to the power of visual art: When you’re allotted no more than a single piece of paper, it becomes startlingly clear that a picture can indeed be worth a thousand words. The challenges Solomon faced in the camp were horrible, he told me, but the older generation — his teachers — managed to preserve a sense of his cultural inheritance.
“There’s this notion of raising a village that I really liked,” he told me. “I wanted to be such a neighbor when I grew up and found a home.”
In 2008, when Solomon turned 14, his family gained refugee status in Phoenix, Arizona, joining a wave of refugees arriving in the Southwestern U.S. Solomon enrolled at Central High School, one of the city’s most diverse schools, and quickly found a home in its art department. When a counselor tried to force him to replace the art electives he wanted to take with language classes, he gave her a painting he made of a football player. Charmed, she dropped the requirement and even donated art supplies for his personal use. His former art teachers describe him as nothing short of a prodigy.
“He came in knowing things that other kids didn’t, and I never found out how,” Cianne Conklin, his freshman art teacher, told me. “He had the kind of talent that you come across only a few times in your career.”
Solomon’s quiet confidence and toothy grin made him popular with the other African immigrants in his class, many of whom were fellow asylum seekers. Some of these friends sat for the paintings in his first solo exhibition in 2020, “African for the First Time,” a series of photorealist portraits of African refugees living in Arizona. Brooke Grucella, who curated the exhibition, which was held at the Joseph Gross Gallery in Tucson, told me that Solomon’s work stood out for the intimacy of his relationship with his subjects. “The backgrounds of the sitters was really important for him,” she said. “Knowing the sitters helped him bring a vibrancy to the paintings, like you could almost see the stories in the eyes, clothing, patterns and brushstrokes in the work.”
“He had the kind of talent that you come across only a few times in your career.”
His portraits drew from the realism of the early Northern Renaissance, particularly the paintings of Jan van Eyck, born in 1390, whose native Belgium became one of the primary colonial forces in the European scramble for control of Africa’s resources during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When tasked with making his own self-portrait, Solomon evoked the artist directly, swapping the famous red headwrap in van Eyck’s self-portrait for his own gold-patterned lappa, a traditional West African garment. In all of his paintings, Solomon contrasts the patterns of African materials with a bright monochromatic backdrop, cleverly manufacturing settings in which the frustrating context of Western immigration falls away so that the sitters appear alone, confident and unassailable in their own timeless dignity.
“I wanted to create a situation where these people could be fixed at any time in history,” he told me. “Where, if you were to wind back the wheels of time, it could still make sense. I wanted to find ways for the ancestors to be alive, because we are the results of their choices. Erasing the very fine lines between those who have passed and those who are now is interesting to me.”
SOLOMON ARRIVED IN ARIZONA at a critical moment for Africans living in the Southwest. Over the last 30 years, Arizona’s African refugee population has boomed, with yearly arrivals increasing from 3,000 to 40,000 since 1990. A quarter of them hail from West African countries like Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, where internal armed conflicts have forced families to flee. Many put down roots in the state’s capital: Since 2010, the total number of African-born immigrants living in Phoenix has nearly doubled. The valley has received over 1,200 refugees from Liberia alone since 2000, three-quarters of whom arrived between 2003 and 2006. When Solomon’s family touched down at Sky Harbor in 2008, they were among 45 Liberian refugees who resettled in the Grand Canyon State that year.
Their initial reception by locals was tepid, if curious. In a state plagued by constant debates over immigration, it was not altogether clear where Black Africans fit within the long-standing Latino, white and tribal community divisions. Being Black in Arizona has always carried its own risk: Black residents make up less than 6% of the state’s population, yet the FBI estimates that nearly 60% of hate crimes in the state target Black people. Research done by Adam Mahoney for Capital B News shows that Phoenix’s Black neighborhoods suffer disproportionately from a lack of city infrastructure investment, which affects everything from property value and education quality to pregnancy care — and even access to shade on hot summer days. In South Phoenix, which is home to a large contingent of the city’s Black population, 99% of homes suffer from the risk of extreme heat, compared with only 58% of homes in North Phoenix.
“I wanted to find ways for the ancestors to be alive, because we are the results of their choices. Erasing the very fine lines between those who have passed and those who are now is interesting to me.”
Despite this, a sense of solidarity within Phoenix’s Black community was not guaranteed for African immigrants, especially with other children, and Solomon told me that he and his friends often felt like “underdogs” among their African American peers. The situation for Black Africans was especially perilous the year after Solomon arrived, when a local story about the rape of an 8-year-old Liberian girl by a group of Liberian boys made international headlines. The Guardian and CNN, among other media sources, reported that the girl’s family rejected her afterwards, telling authorities that their daughter had brought them shame. (Abuse charges against the girl’s parents were later dismissed.) Liberia’s president was quick to criticize the family’s response and even sent an emissary to visit the city, but the stereotypical notion that immigrants, even documented ones, do not fit into American society is quick to attach to newcomers in the Borderlands, and hard to remove.
The community that African immigrants found with each other, however, was far stronger than the media would have people believe. Friends and family often gathered at West African churches, such as Africa Faith Expressions, which served as a hub for celebrating Liberian holidays and honoring the achievements of community members. Solomon’s own family was fortunate enough to have Liberian neighbors who helped them get settled in their new home, despite the fact that they, too, had just come to America, a mere month before Solomon did.
“They shared every lesson they’d learned in that month so that our lives could be just a little bit easier,” Solomon told me. “Those friendships exist to this day. It’s a communal experience for refugees here, not an individual one.”
All of Solomon’s sitters are, like himself, African refugees in Phoenix. His work situates them in a way that challenges his adopted home’s past and opens a window into its future. The monochromatic backgrounds of his portraits, for example, strike at the artistic conscience of Arizona, which, like many other Western states, relies on a popular tradition of landscape portraiture, as seen in the photography of Ansel Adams or the paintings of Maynard Dixon, which maintain a romantic perception of the desert as pure and innocent, a blank canvas waiting to be filled.
In fact, Arizona’s history is a rich but rather messy palimpsest, from the complex Hohokam canals that eventually determined Phoenix’s grid system to the Norteño roots of the Borderlands’ cuisine and music. Many of us who grew up in Phoenix’s predominantly white suburbs possess a passive relation to the state’s layered history, largely gleaned from the names of our streets, schools and neighborhoods. I grew up near Pima road, for example, was a student at Cochise and Cocopah, and lived in a tract development called La Cuesta. While the suburban fetish for tribal and ranchero culture has faded — the turquoise mostly traded in for crypto — these neighborhoods and street names are, in their own cockeyed way, proof that the desert was never as empty of humanity as the landscape artists would have us believe.
The political geographer Natalie Koch, in her groundbreaking book Arid Empire, ties Arizona’s artistic penchant for empty deserts to its colonial period as a testing ground for an imperial dream of “the desert as a blank slate to enact some grand vision rather than being someone else’s home.” Such idealized visions can inadvertently cause human displacement, either through military struggles like the Mexican-American War, or by simple resource mismanagement, as when international corporations suck up the groundwater supply in Arizona’s own La Paz county.
“It’s a communal experience for refugees here, not an individual one.”
Solomon’s portraits flip that formula on its head: By entirely removing the landscape that inspired America’s visions of a vast desert empire from his paintings’ background, he refocuses our attention on the people who actually live here.
“Once you start painting a landscape, you contextualize these people in a specific place,” he told me. “I wanted to create an environment where there was no environment, where (the sitters) were enough to hold attention, where you don’t need to look beyond the faces involved to know what you need to know.”
In his 2019 work, If You Can’t Remember, It’s Not Important — Sureya Mardaadi, Somalia, Solomon situates his sitter in front of a pale blue background that reminds one of the Phoenix sky on a hot summer day. He draws inspiration from Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in both the framing and composition of the portrait. Like Vermeer’s subject, Solomon’s sitter wears a matching headwrap and warm outer layer, although in place of a pearl earring she has a silver nose ring. In Solomon’s painting, however, each item carries a distinctive heritage: the red shaash and yellow maro both belonged to Mardaadi’s grandmother, and her nose piercing signifies a ritual from her paternal tribe. Both Solomon and Vermeer positioned their sitters so that they gaze over their shoulders, except that Solomon reverses Mardaadi’s orientation; if you were to view the portraits side by side in the chronological order in which they were painted, it would appear as if Vermeer’s model and Mardaadi were standing back-to-back, with Solomon’s sitter oriented toward the future while Vermeer’s faces the past.
Mardaadi’s gaze seems to say: This is what Arizona looks like today. In this way, the exhibition’s title, “African for the First Time,” has an ironic relationship with both the subject and the audience. There’s the shared experience of immigrants from places as far apart as Nigeria, Congo and Somalia discovering novel connections to each other in an American context that reduces their identity to simply “African,” but there’s also the experience of Arizona viewers who come to recognize — for the first time — the long-overlooked African layer on their state’s cultural landscape.
Today, Solomon continues to create work that uses history to challenge his viewers. When I visited his studio recently, he showed me a series in process he calls “Tarp Baby,” which includes several portraits of his teenage nephew. One shows the 14-year-old dressed in an old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff collar, a flowing plastic tarp and crisp Nike Air Force 1’s. Each article of clothing carries figurative weight: The choking collar of European colonialism, the billowing polyethylene tarp from his refugee camp in Guinea, the all-white sneakers signifying the new racial dynamics in his adopted America. As Solomon pointed to each element, I noticed for the first time since I arrived that he had not taken his hands off a curious instrument, which looks like a short cane with a clotted knob top. I asked him what it was.
“I wanted to create an environment where there was no environment, where (the sitters) were enough to hold attention, where you don’t need to look beyond the faces involved to know what you need to know.”
“It’s a maulstick,” he explained. “A Western instrument used for stability while you paint.”
He showed me how it works, holding the bunched end against the canvas while resting his brush hand on the stick. Then he flashed a smile.
“Mine was constructed out of my mom’s curtain rod and her old leather purse. I didn’t have the money to buy one, you see, so I took it upon myself to create my own. Now I carry it with me wherever I go.”
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the February 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Draped in history.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
