Mary Lovelace O’Neal is known for fusing the painterly and gestural elements of Abstract Expressionism with the political and cultural consciousness of the civil rights and Black Arts movements in her work. For this multimedia painting, the artist drew inspiration from a childhood memory of her father’s holiday production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s "Ahmal and the Night Visitors" (1951).

The opera, which recounts the travels of the three Biblical kings in search of the newborn Christ child, includes King Balthazar singing: “I live in a black marble palace full of black panthers and white doves.” Fusing the passion of the running red panthers with the liberation of the white doves, Lovelace O’Neal symbolically evokes the imaginary realms that Black artists and activists create for themselves when confronting the material effects of systemic racism in the real world.