“Un Domingo con mama” (Sunday with Mom)

Uri Whitehead:
In this relief print, concha-shaped alien spaceships abduct my mother outside Little Flower Church in San Antonio, TX. While others run in panic and fear, a young girl calmly eats a paleta ice cream, observing the chaos. This scene symbolizes how I felt as a child when my mother became religious—from my young perspective, it felt as though she had been abducted before my eyes and returned as a different person.

It was a pivotal moment in my childhood. Many events that followed deeply impacted our family dynamic and shifted my perspective.

The conchas, the church, and the ice cream are all tied to places in the neighborhood where I grew up. Setting this personal experience in a familiar environment was important to me—it allowed me to capture the feelings I had as a child: helpless in the face of a change I couldn’t control, a change that ultimately led to my parents’ separation and my siblings and me being split into different households.


Uri Whitehead:
In this relief print, concha-shaped alien spaceships abduct my mother outside Little Flower Church in San Antonio, TX. While others run in panic and fear, a young girl calmly eats a paleta ice cream, observing the chaos. This scene symbolizes how I felt as a child when my mother became religious—from my young perspective, it felt as though she had been abducted before my eyes and returned as a different person.

It was a pivotal moment in my childhood. Many events that followed deeply impacted our family dynamic and shifted my perspective.

The conchas, the church, and the ice cream are all tied to places in the neighborhood where I grew up. Setting this personal experience in a familiar environment was important to me—it allowed me to capture the feelings I had as a child: helpless in the face of a change I couldn’t control, a change that ultimately led to my parents’ separation and my siblings and me being split into different households.