"Empty Bed with The Virgin Mary" places a familiar religious icon into an intimate, unglamorous domestic setting, asking the viewer to sit with the tension between the sacred and the everyday. Awol Erizku, photographed here in 2013 during an early and critically significant period of his practice, positions a Virgin Mary figurine beside an unmade bed, its rumpled sheets suggesting recent occupation and the particular vulnerability of absence. The chromatic print is rendered with the kind of lush, deliberate color palette that has come to define Erizku's visual language, where saturated hues carry as much narrative weight as the objects themselves. The composition rewards sustained looking, drawing attention to the way devotional objects migrate into private spaces and accumulate new meaning through proximity to the body and its routines. Erizku trained at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University School of Art, and his work consistently interrogates representation, spirituality, and cultural mythology through the lens of contemporary Black experience. This piece reflects his broader interest in recontextualizing symbols that carry enormous historical freight, questioning who has been centered within those traditions and who has been excluded or overlooked. The unmade bed functions as a kind of portrait of someone absent, and the Virgin Mary figure, rather than presiding with authority, becomes a quiet companion within that absence, humanized and slightly diminished by the scale and ordinariness of her surroundings. Available as an edition of three and signed by the artist, this work is held and offered through The FLAG Art Foundation, a significant provenance for a piece that stands as an early marker of a now widely collected and internationally exhibited practice.