In a recent solo exhibition, Lyfe In a Strange Land, at Void Gallery in San Francisco, painter Yarrow Lazer-Smith (AKA Yarrow Slaps) presented a series of paintings that inspired imaginative possibilities within the  troubling context of Western society’s once abundantly prevalent custom of slavery. The creative premise of Slap’s show is rooted in a hopeful reimagining of one of the darkest chapters in history: the transatlantic slave trade. Beginning in the 16th century, millions of Africans, mostly from Western and West-Central Africa, were captured and enslaved by American and European capitalists who thereafter transported them to the then-called New World, eventually into permanent bondage slavery.