Black Appolo is a painting by Chicago based visual artist Andrea Coleman. Throughout the composition, an ephemeral image of the face of the central figure fades in and out amid layers of heavily abstracted colors and forms. Coleman’s paintings are based on family folklore. Using a process begins and ends with storytelling, she listens to the stories members of her family tell her about the past, and then seeks out the other people who were part of the same story and asks them to tell her their version of events. Using a 360 camera, she photographs the locations where these stories took place, and then mixes her photographs with family photos that relate to the story being told. She layers brush marks and splotches of color then erases or whites out sections of the image. The act of erasure makes spaces in the image for lost information to reappear, and for hidden trauma be memorialized. “These images that I make welcome the complexities of re-remembering,” Coleman says. “The story is bigger than itself. When you go and sit down with a certain person, they’ll tell you a story, and regardless if you’ve heard the story, you’ll be intrigued because you’re hearing their perspective on the story. It tells about the person, and it tells you about your history, and it also tells you about the nature of storytelling in general.” While rooted in the past, Coleman’s images feel liberated from nostalgia. Their mixture of painterly layers and missing parts gives them a sense of mystery that makes room for the idea that these stories and the people who remember them are still very much alive and in process.