Reason. Halim A. Flowers read the Wall Street Journal every day of his incarceration and kept the habit when he came home in 2019. He wanted to make visual work and had convinced himself he could not draw or paint — he told himself he was colorblind, when in fact he simply had no vocabulary for hues beyond the primaries. So he chose the one canvas he could approach with confidence: the newspaper itself. He handwrote poetry and commentary directly onto the printed page, photographed the result at high resolution, and had it printed on archival museum-grade paper. He called the form photo poetry. Both works were made in October and November 2019. The painting came the following year, in quarantine. These are what came first.

The two works. Both substrates are now identified from the objects themselves. Black Migration is written across The Wall Street Journal Review section, page C14, Saturday/Sunday 21–22 December 2019 — Susan Delson's “Telling the American Story,” on Jacob Lawrence's Struggle: From the History of the American People reunited at the Peabody Essex Museum, illustrated with a Lawrence panel and Hank Willis Thomas's sculpture Rich Black Specimen #460 (2017). A formerly incarcerated poet's hand sits directly on top of a page about the Migration Series and its inheritors, with @-handles for the WSJ, Hank Willis Thomas and For Freedoms worked into the margins. Superpredator is written across the Washington City Paper cover, Volume 39 No. 41, 11–17 October 2019 — “How to End a Sentence,” reported by Mitch Ryals, cover photograph by Darrow Montgomery. The subject of that cover photograph is Flowers himself. The poem written across it is Just Mercy, made while he served as an ambassador for Represent Justice, the national campaign around Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative. One work sits on somebody else's history. The other sits on his own.

Creation window, corrected. The originator's recorded testimony places both works in October and November 2019. The Wall Street Journal page beneath Black Migration is dated 21–22 December 2019, so that work cannot pre-date it. The registry window is recorded as October to December 2019. The sequence the testimony establishes is unaffected: both works still pre-date the first painting (2020) and remain the artist's first visual works.

Edition and custody. Each title is an edition of two — one impression kept by the artist, one for placement. The second impressions of both titles are held in the collection of John Burbank (Passport Capital; Nimble Hog Ventures; co-owner, Golden State Warriors), Flowers' first art collector, who commissioned fifteen works after hearing him speak at the Apple Store in Union Square, San Francisco. The artist retains impression 1/2 of each title, the master digital files, and the original newspapers the poems were written on. Reproduction control therefore sits entirely with the originator.

Exhibition. Both works travelled in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, guest-curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, which opened at MoMA PS1 on 17 September 2020 and continued through six venues to October 2024 — AEIVA at UAB, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Bell and Cohen Galleries at Brown University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and Two Rivers / Robert Frederick Gallery at the University of Northern British Columbia. Four years, six institutions, two countries. That record is the single largest input into this valuation, and it is now corroborated at the wall: an originator-supplied photograph of the exhibition label names both titles, dates both 2019, gives the medium as digital print, and carries a lender line reading “Courtesy Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans.” That line is new information and is treated as an open chain-of-title item in §06.

Rights. No license, sale, use agreement, or grant of any kind exists on either work. Title in the poems and the composite images rests with the originator. What is not resolved is the layer underneath, and the exhibits sharpen it considerably. No waiver was obtained from Dow Jones or the Washington City Paper for the newsprint used as substrate. The WSJ page does not merely carry press photographs — it reproduces a Jacob Lawrence painting, credited on the page to the Artists Rights Society, and a Hank Willis Thomas sculpture, credited to Jack Shainman Gallery. The WCP cover portrait is credited to Darrow Montgomery. Three identified rights administrations sit inside these two objects. §06 treats this as the asset's hard gate.

Intended use. The originator does not seek to license either work for commercial use and does not intend to sell. Permitted use is public exhibition for educational purposes consistent with the mission of the Artonomics initiative, and public display in the interest of youth development and the conservation of African American history and culture. §05 prices that surface.