On a recent bright and cold afternoon I stood inside the new Great Jones Gallery (GJG), located in the Pound Arts building on Capitol Hill, and watched Seattle-based artist Marin Burnett assemble the pieces of her debut solo show, Ascension.

Pulling from her experience as a Black woman with deep roots in the South, much of the exhibition is based around the river baptisms she witnessed growing up. Drawn first with pastels and then blown up into a giclée print, she composed six portraits of Black women dressed in white in various stages of baptism: a woman being blessed in water, a woman ascending toward the sky. She sees the ritual less in a strictly religious way, but more as an allegory for rebirth and Black folks' belief in a higher power to overcome hardship.