Make It Enough is one of the most quietly devastating works in Now What? Or What Else?. Its surface is crowded with contradiction: blue skies, green fields, brown and yellow bodies, playful sun and curved shapes that imply leisure. It almost reads like a day at the beach or a lakeside park—until you look closer.

Brown figures gather near a murky body of greenish water. Some recline, some wade, some seem paused mid-gesture, locked in the familiar rhythms of leisure. Bright colors punctuate their presence: swimwear, towels, umbrellas; but the water is thick, the air is still, and the horizon is crowded with industry. Smokestacks rise in the background. Oil rigs interrupt the horizon. Industrial signage and symbols—Xs, dollar signs, disembodied hands—invade the space. They rise like background noise, structural and permanent, as if part of the natural landscape. The water isn’t clearly water. The land doesn’t feel safe. The beach is fictional, or poisoned, or both.

This isn’t leisure—it’s survival dressed as recreation. this work reveals the psychic shift that happens after awareness: we keep going. We party. We pose. We picnic next to poison. The scene holds no irony, only truth. This is not satire, nor celebration; it is resignation rendered in color. The figures—fragmented and faceless—suggest people forced to make do with what they’ve been given: a polluted shoreline, a toxic pond, a post-industrial landscape repackaged as public space. It’s the illusion of access in a place long marked for extraction. A place where brown and Black people are asked not only to survive, but to smile through it. This painting doesn’t ask questions - it embodies them. It’s both answer and aftermath, a vivid portrait of people caught between collapse and a deep need to feel normal.

The title, pulled from a line from the movie, Friday—“Make it enough”—is both personal and political. What begins as a joke between the character, Smokey, and his mother becomes, here, a biting commentary on the environmental racism that forces communities to treat toxic environments as normal. As usable. As beautiful. It’s a command issued by systems that know exactly what they’re doing.

Make It Enough lives at the intersection of systemic harm and daily ritual. It echoes the larger, more abstract depictions of collapse in the other works on paper, while pointing directly to the quiet choreography of coping visible in the more intimate paintings: lighting a joint, sitting in silence, touching water that might not be safe. This is what they’ve been given. They’re still here. Still swimming. Still trying. And somehow, that’s supposed to be enough.