[5][6] Early in her career in 2000 Holland Cotter remarked in the New York Times that Awai's then figurative paintings were sourced with "unprettified technique and a metaphorical bent" and that West Indies Colonialism was her subject.

He noted that in the 2000 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem curated by Thelma Golden, Awai shared with other artists such as Sanford Biggers a looser sort of cultural signage as well as a post-1990s identity fluidity.

[7] Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Senior Curator at El Museum del Barrio, described her layered imagery as identity politics that include both popular culture and her own personal manual of images.

Her monument rendering was inspired by the Grand Army Plaza memorial arch which is a tribute to fighters for the Union, focusing on the African-American man who surveys and stands ready for battle.

Historian Rocio Armanda-Alvaraz writes about their intent to reconsider minimalist art language of the 1970s to bring a sophisticated yet non-narrative version of carnival, borrowing from an ethnicized and racialized past that has asserted itself, via their installation, in the present.

[30] The sculpture incorporated a wide variety of materials such as sprayed paper, resin, plastic, nail polish, and clay, resulting in bold, complex three-dimensional structures, which seemed to pull, stretch, and tear from the wall.

Through an Art Matters Grant trip in 2012 to Le Brea a childhood memory of a nearby pitch lake resonated with her so she photographed close-up details of it as the basis for wall sized paintings for the gallery.

"[34] According to Awai, asphalt is, "literally the remnants of all of us, the decomposition of all flora and all fauna over the course of known time that keeps turning, churning and revealing at the same instance material and items randomly from yesterday and four hundred years ago.

Awai's juxtaposition of the infinity of the black ooze, the suggested locality of the rendered skins of animals, as well as the here and now of her own figurative likeness continue her signature premise of the complexity of matter and historical narrative.

Repeating butterfly-like paper shapes in dark blue, black, and gray hover around the column, often with a gray-tone image of the crouching soldier in the middle of them evoking cherubim or ethereal figures.