Sermonesque (2003) is dedicated to W. E. B. DuBois (1868 - 1963) and combines ideas from the writer and activist’s seminal work on the Black church and music. The work was first exhibited in Darkwater: Recital in Four Dominions, Terry Adkins after W. E. B. DuBois (2003).
 
For DuBois, the church stood at the center of the Black community. His 1930 book The Negro Church was the first major sociological study of the church based on empirical evidence, and the result was a portrait of a vibrant institution with a multitude of voices. In his earlier publication The Souls of Black Folk (1903), DuBois contended that Black spirituals are the only distinctly "American music". The opening chapter, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, describes realities of Black life in the South at the turn of the twentieth century:

The shades of the prison–house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.[1]

The latticed iron structure of Sermonesque gestures both to these unscalable walls and the pulpit from which black preachers delivered their sermons, while the snare drum embellished with buttons centers music. Together, the work’s scale and formidable presence exude DuBois’s desire for the church to become a transformative power for social, racial, and economic uplift.

[1] W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 4-5