This work represents two women living in different time periods in Providence, Rhode Island: the contemporary actress, Sylvia Ann Soares as well as the early twentieth century painter, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. Besides her many accomplishments, Prophet was the first (known) African American (and Narragansett-Pequot) to graduate from Rhode Island School of Design (1918,) and is now the subject of a traveling retrospective which has given her a new audience and new awareness. Soares wrote and performed plays in which she portrays Prophet, recovering her life and memory from historical records, and specifically quoting from her Paris diary. I asked Soares to come in character as Prophet to serve as a model for this painting.