Two Joyces, Oil on Canvas, 5’8” x 5’8”, 2025

Two Joyces
Oil on Canvas, 5’8” x 5’8”, 2025

Two Joyces was inspired from my love of art history and connection with Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas—her double self-portrait painted after separating from Diego Rivera. In her work, two versions of Frida sit side by side, hearts exposed and connected by a single vein, bound by love and pain, identity and loss.

In my own reimagining, I explore the duality that lives within me. On the right sits “Joyce”—the artist, the dreamer, the traveler, the friend —wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie. Her rose-colored glasses reflect hope. Around her neck is the necklace she found in Venice during graduate school, a quiet reminder that she is, and will always be, an artist. Her heart is whole, and in her hand she holds a locket with a dove of peace.

Beside her sits another self, born of her Indiana roots: blonde, slender, ever-smiling, dressed in red, white, and blue with a cross around her neck and a wedding ring on her finger. She carries the weight of tradition, of place, of expectation.

They sit together holding hands—two versions of one woman, holding the tension between freedom and belonging, faith and organized religion, hope and history.

Though deeply personal, Two Joyces speaks to something larger—the divisions that run through our country and through each of us, and the quiet, relentless desire to reconcile them.