Roscoe Hall

Wanted, 2025

Ingredients: Mixed media

Thoughts: This work pulls from the raw, unfiltered intimacy of mugshots, capturing the weight of a moment where love itself was criminalized. The central figure embodies Mildred Loving, a Black woman whose marriage to a white man led to her arrest in 1958—a love deemed illegal under Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. Her face, caught between defiance and vulnerability, speaks to the quiet but unshakable strength of someone unjustly placed under the state’s gaze. The numbers 581016, written in paint and buried beneath layers of oak charcoal, hold coded significance. Each digit references a pivotal moment in the Lovings’ fight for justice—“58” for 1958, the year of their arrest, “10” for October 1965, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear their case, and “16” as a nod to the 16 states where interracial marriage was still illegal before the Loving v. Virginia ruling in 1967. These numbers become more than a fabricated record; they stand in for all those reduced to statistics for simply loving the wrong person at the wrong time. 

WANTED is a contradiction—both a criminal designation and a declaration of desire, of longing, of being seen.

It asks how we measure the cost of love when the law itself was once against it. History and what gets unraveled, who owns the narrative, and what still holds weight in the ever-shifting culture landscape.

72”x60”

$14,000