How can artists hold systems of power accountable? Inside his home studio, Cincinnati-based conceptual artist Michael Coppage sculpts his answer. Michael’s latest ongoing body of work, 12 Commandments, comprises a series of bronze sculptures that he casted from his own body. Each sculpture embodies the tension, vulnerability, and physiological violence of Black life interrupted by police encounters and other forms of state-sanctioned force. The sculptures reflect a shared experience of fear, surveillance, and erasure imposed on the lives and bodies of multiply-marginalized communities. 

I visited his studio to photograph the work and witness the labor behind it. The photographs I created serve as companions to the sculptures, as well as a record of an artist committed to finishing the work–however long it takes.

Each 12 Commandments sculpture is cast directly from Michael’s own body, using the lost wax method, dating back to Roman times. Michael holds each pose for up to five hours—unmoving—while the wax  slowly takes form  around his body parts. This intensive  process is as physically grueling as it is emotionally charged. The series’ title—12 Commandments—references both biblical scripture and the slang term for police in hip-hop culture.

Each sculpture’s pose and title references well-known orders police officers bark to enforce control over civilians: 

GET ON YOUR KNEES  

HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK 

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT 

These phrases are ingrained into the Black collective memory. They are held and remembered in the body.

The studio was shrouded in shadow. Improvisational rock music played quietly through a speaker in the background, creating an atmosphere perfect for concentration. The room overflowed with paintings, open sketchbooks, and a spotlit table in the center where three completed sculptures stood: Hands Where I Can See Them, Get on Your Knees, and Hands Behind Your Back. Michael shapes each sculpture to life with details such as bandaged and textured skin, each sculpture is incredibly lifelike. The goosebumps and tense limbs Michael sculpted in bronze were not abstractions but records. Each sculpture serves as an entombed archive.

“Before 2024, I was making work about the realities of Black life—policing, survival, overexposure. Now I’m also asking: how has whiteness shaped that experience?” 12 Commandments is his way of holding a mirror to the structures that have made this violence possible—and asking who gets to look away.

I imagined myself the same positions: arms locked behind my back, knees pressed into the floor, immobile. What thoughts might arise in that stillness? Rational thought would escape me. Emotions would flood my senses. I felt anger, fear, and the accumulated weight of the historical memory and current reality of state-sanctioned violence that continues to mark Black and Brown bodies as suspicious and dangerous. I could not survive that silence nor the vulnerability and the re-traumatization of it. Michael mentally and physically submits himself to that space willingly, again and again.

“It had to be me,” he said. “No one else would hold it that long.”

Michael’s sculptural series 12 Commandments confronts racial injustice and police violence through a practice of embodied resistance during a time of increased racial surveillance.. “There’s a culture of silence now,” he said. “We’re legislating language out of our conversations. But if we lose the words, we lose the fight.”

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