Spiced Spumoni (magnolia x brooklynensis), 2025, acrylic, oil, interference, iridescent on paper.

Spiced Spumoni takes its name from an Italian-American dessert—layered, colorful, and shaped by migration—using it as a cultural analogue for the Brooklyn Magnolia itself. Magnolia × brooklynensis is a mid-20th-century hybrid developed at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden through the deliberate crossing of an American magnolia with Asian species, part of a postwar project of public science and civic optimism. Like spumoni, which emerged from Italian culinary traditions adapted to American tastes, the Brooklyn Magnolia is a product of translation rather than purity: engineered for colder urban climates and defined by its unexpected palette of yellow-green petals flushed with bruised purples and pinks. This painting is made over the photographic reference used for its analogous oil on canvas, layers with an acrylic glass surface on top of which a rich variety of iridescent, interference, and metallic pigments are applied. It shimmers in the light like a precious jewel.