Golden is from a series Todd Gray made while living at the American Academy in Rome from 2022-2023 after being awarded the prestigious Rome Prize. The artwork merges an image of Gray from his 2006 Shaman Series—for which the artist covered his face with shaving cream as a metaphor for the suffocating whiteness of the colonized mind—with architectural details of the Catholic Church, one of the subjects Gray photographed while in Rome. In the context of Golden, the gold paint mixed with shaving cream is used to represent the commodified value of black bodies dating to the slave trade, while also commenting on the Catholic Church’s mission in West Africa that enriched both the Church and powerful imperial elites. By locating his own image at the top of the artwork, Gray places himself in the alpha position common in Catholic images—a statement of the artist’s self realization of his own value, and countering notions of the internalized devaluation of self that Frantz Fanon describes in his writings on the colonized mind.