There are few experiences more heartwarming to an artist like me than finding out that your work has made an impact on people. One of them, a scholar by the name of Marta Garcia Morcillo, even cited my work in an academic paper published in the book Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women in the Ancient World.
“The graphic artist Brandon S. Pilcher…has created a series of illustrations of famous ancient African women that address post-colonial deconstructions of Western classicism. These colorful black-African characters include Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Cleopatra VII, Hypathia and Sophonisba.”
— Garcia Morcillo, M. (2020). “Exotic, Erotic, Heroic? Women of Carthage in Western Imagination”. In F. Carlà -Uhink, & A. Wieber (Eds.), Orientalism and the Reception of Powerful Women from the Ancient World (pp. 134-158). Bloomsbury.
You can read the full text of the paper here. It’s only a brief mention toward the end, but I love how she characterized my work as “addressing post-colonial deconstructions of Western classicism” nonetheless.