Rooted in Magic, Memory, & Melanin
Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot is a solo art project by artist Courtney Alexander as an offering to the Black Diaspora—complex, powerful, and multi-dimensional.
An Offering to the Spirit of blackness
THE DECK
The first widely distributed tarot deck created by a Black artist, Dust II Onyx is a groundbreaking spiritual and artistic work. It is a reclamation. A celebration. A living, breathing altar to the beauty, pain, power, and complexity of the Black experience.Through lush textures, layered symbolism, and an intentional color story, Dust II Onyx channels Blackness not just as identity but as energy. It moves beyond representation into embodiment—holding space for grief, joy, healing, and transcendence.Each card is a mirror and a portal. A tactile connection to ancestral memory. A call to wholeness. A deep honoring of the Diaspora in all its richness.
Building and healing worlds
THE ARTIST
Courtney Alexander is a multimedia artist, writer, and ritual practitioner whose creative work is a vessel for healing, remembrance, and spiritual reclamation. Her practice began with intimate explorations of fatness, duality, and self-awareness—creating space to examine the layers of her existence as a Black, fat, queer woman. Vulnerability became portal. Art became ritual.In 2016, she made history as the first Black person to successfully publish and distribute a tarot deck—the widely acclaimed Dust II Onyx—funded by a groundbreaking Kickstarter campaign. Through 78 mixed-media paintings, she pieced together a mosaic of selfhood, offering Blackness not just as identity, but as universal-spirit. But her work didn’t stop with a deck. It became the foundation for something deeper.Courtney is also the visionary behind The Spiral Tarot System—a reimagining of traditional tarot that centers wholeness, fluidity, and ancestral alignment. It is a system born from the same root energy as Dust II Onyx, but expansive in its reach and radical in its intent.She continues to reclaim space—spiritually and artistically—for those often unseen, offering works that are not just visual, but vessels for transformation and liberation.
“I reimagine a timeless ancient world intrinsically intertwined in this modern realm, birthed from a place of nothingness that is also simultaneously everything. A non-binary world where I see myself, reflections of Blackness, and darkness, as powerful and eternal.”
From Cards to Cosmology
THE SPIRAL
The Spiral is not just a system. It is a philosophy. A cosmology. A return.Designed by Courtney Alexander, The Spiral Tarot System emerges from a need to break free from linear, hierarchical frameworks traditionally found in tarot. It rejects binaries and embraces the fluid, non-linear nature of spiritual evolution—centering Blackness, wholeness, and the cyclical truth of existence.Where conventional tarot is structured as a straight path from Fool to World, The Spiral curves. It circles back, expands outward, and folds inward again. It honors the way we grow in layers, through reflection, reorientation, and return.This system is deeply informed by Courtney’s own lived experience, artistic language, and spiritual praxis. It is intuitive. It is ancestral. It holds space for contradiction, transformation, and becoming.The Spiral invites us to move differently—with more grace, more truth, and deeper self-trust. It’s not about mastering tarot. It’s about remembering yourself.
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