[Denzel Mitchell Jr.] My name is Denzel Mitchell Jr. and I'm a farmer and an art lover. When I saw this I immediately thought of my grandmother and aunties working in the field and gathering up every last scrap of produce that was usable or, in this case, probably grain. The term gleaner means somebody who captures the leftovers in the field. So you harvest the top quality, and that goes off to market and the farmer makes money and then what’s left you glean from the field, and that tends to be what’s been damaged, or maybe not as pristine. And this is what goes to the family. It’s what goes to the community. To me, the artist is making it clear that these women are noble, and what's powerful is that they are able to look in the field and identify the stalks that actually have viable seed heads on them, which is very, very skilled work. Farm work in general is backbreaking and hard on the body. And it requires so many skills, but specifically how you manage your physical load and your labor is a skill in itself. The objects in the background are actually massive piles of straw or hay for the animals. And the way that the women are holding the stalks and the seed heads, the grain tops come off their body, that kind of also makes them look like these massive piles of straw. I certainly can see the connection.

This black-and-white conté crayon drawing is approximately 8 inches high and 11 and a half inches wide. The drawing, which is rough and sketch-like, shows three figures gleaning, or gathering the remnants left over from a harvest. The women wear long skirts and headscarves. The two women on the left of the image are bent over at the waist—their positions mimicking one another—and reach toward the ground to pick up leftover stalks of wheat. The third woman, to the right, either bends down or stands up during the collection process. Each of the women holds a bundle of grain that has already been collected. In the distance, other figures are working to harvest the field, overseen by a figure on horseback. There are haystacks in the distant landscape at the edge of the farm field.