Barkley Hendricks, known for his stunning portraits of Black individuals, first visited Jamaica in 1983 on his honeymoon with wife Susan Weig. Following this trip, the couple would return each winter for their annual vacations. In 2011, Hendricks began his “Passion Dancehall” series, which featured Black-Jamaican people dancing with blocks of high-pitched colors blazing in the background. Jamaican dancehall music was popular on the island in the 1980s, and in the 2000s it experienced mainstream success. The music facilitated a psycho-physiological form of stress relief which was bolstered by the philosophies of Emperor Haile Selassie and the Rastafarian movement. Rastafarianism relied heavily on the Old Testament, with devotees who believed that smoking marijuana was powerful, and that Black people would be unified and liberated through repatriation to Africa.