Art Militant: LAW brings "Sunday Mornings Pillars of Strength" to Big Bethel AME Church
Visual artist Lawrence "LAW" Parker III presented the newest chapter of his traveling exhibition “Sunday mornings: Pillars of Strength” at Big Bethel AME Church from October 1-5, 2025 for Atlanta Art Week. This marked the exhibition’s second tour stop since the grand opening in New Orleans on Super Bowl LIV Weekend, where he also publicly announced his appointment as Cultural Heritage Action Fund Fellow. In this body of work, LAW continues his exploration of memory, faith, and cultural inheritance through large-scale canvases that echo the presence of stained glass. Saturated patterns met quiet figures, often touched with sheets of gold further signifying black dominance and care.
“Big Bethel”, Atlanta’s oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation, was not just a backdrop for expression in Sunday Mornings but truly part of the story. Known for providing a stage for leaders speaking truth, pressing for progress, and declaring self-emancipation, the church embodies similar values LAW places at the center of this series.
Wednesday’s opening reception commenced in a choral enchantment with a graceful medley from a gospel choir, reminiscent of Parker’s upbringing at Mount Sinai Baptist Church in New Orleans. LAW captures nostalgia through sound and performance, carrying the legacy of his grandfather and elders in every iteration of this powerful conversation between artist, ancestor, and aesthetic weighed against the idea of salvation – this is an emotional journey as well creative for Parker. For many creatives of LAW’s stature in the industry, far too much is built on marketing and spectacle but Sunday Mornings serves as his soft landing into a personal conversation with self and the environment that shaped his creative beginnings and moral system.
The show speaks as a retrospective of Parker’s early years as he followed his grandfather closely, studying his leadership and charisma. While the series’ consistent backdrop is remnant of traditional baptist churches’ stained glass windows, the foregrounds all tell a story of how the Black American Church serves an invaluable asset to its members and community. “A Covenant With You”, the highest standing canvas bears a glowing blue cross seeming to rise out of the assembled formation of patterns, textures and colors found throughout the body of work. While show “Court of Two Sisters” gives a peak st southern fashion in the church as two young girls are shown in Sunday dresses bow-tied at the rear while “Highly Favored”, another towering piece that signals youth curiosity and discipline centering another young girl with a more solid but layered golden canvas, almost resembling an aged plaque, as she reads what I’d take as a Bible or Sunday School workbook. LAW paints dynamic scenes of the many ways the community interacts with the Black Church including a pastor delivering a sermon in “Up a Little Higher” to newlyweds posing with a bouquet positioning the church as sacred place for unity and matrimonial practices. AME's elaborate design assists in shaping LAW’s conceptual perspective of “church” as you make your way around the raised pulpit area, stretching around the altar just before the front rows of church pews, down the aisles, and out of the sanctuary into the narthex.
The sanctuary was a room that felt alive with color, layered with symbolism, and grounded in the idea that Black life, family, and community form an unshakable foundation. The music executive and artist manager moves between disciplines, linking the urgency of heritage work with the immediacy of contemporary art. Sunday Mornings places his vision within the very spaces that hold so much history, ensuring they remain sites of gathering, storytelling, and renewal.
“Sunday Mornings: Pillars of Strength” is curated by Brooke Wyatt and realized in partnership with Freeman Revival, LAW’s cultural initiative, alongside the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation under the direction of architectural historian Brent Leggs. Together, they align preservation with practice to support the restoration of historic Black churches nationwide, introducing new work that keeps their legacy in motion.
