Political Creative Practice
After Ferguson
In 2014, I created the print “Hands Up, Hands In: In Solidarity With the People Of Ferguson” the piece was a print and an image used at protests. In the summer of 2020, I created a linoleum-block print with the messaging “Defund Police Refund Education” as well as a stamp with protesters rights that could be stamped onto their skin at protests. Should they be taken into police custody they would have their rights, in a way, tattooed on their bodies and those around them for reference. I want all of these print works to exist together and build upon one another, not be separate entities that, by art institutional standards, “expire” after so many years. Until systemic injustice is dismantled, this piece will continue to be a living document archiving racial injustice in the carceral police state.
The Femme Maison
I made this little print study of Louise Bourgeois “La Femme Maison” about a week into quarantine in Detroit. Bourgeois originally created the image within a series she started in 1946, exploring themes of a feminine identity that often coexist and contradict one another: being trapped and controlled while also feeling exposed and vulnerable; wanting to be seen and also wanting to hide. This image has always been meaningful to me in my own pursuits to make work about patriarchy, gender, and the feminine experience, but in March when everyone began to lose large swaths of their autonomy due to a global pandemic, and began the inevitable process of the resulting grief, the image of a femme figure trapped in a domestic space while still being vulnerable to harm was turning over in my mind again...
I keep thinking about the people who historically have never experienced marginalization; who have turned away and dismissed the state-sanctioned violence that already plagues most aspects of modern society; who have never had to question their safety in public space before; who had never yet grieved the loss of the potential held in future years of their life; who have accepted the literal imprisonment of millions of people for profit as “natural.” Am I still holding out hope that they development empathy and use their power to help the rest of us transform society? I feel like I want to stop explaining things to me, because our time is becoming more vital by the minute. I feel like if you’re reading this you already get “it” so we should all be asking ourselves: what does community even mean to us? what do we owe to each other? how do we cultivate a social and political revolution when there are no illusions left about who electoral politics actually serves? how do we show up for each other when these institutions do what they were always meant to do for the majority: fail. It might sound sentimental, but I truly believe that we are all responsible for each other. Everything is particularly heavy right now, but I am trying to spend these days slowly figuring out how we emerge from this with that value at the forefront.
Original Sin
Made in 2019 in response to the abortion bans coming out of Missouri, Alabama, and Georgia at the time.
Washtenaw County Youth
I started working with Youth Arts Alliance in January 2017, and have been facilitating printmaking curriculums in juvenile detention facilities throughout southeast Michigan over the past year and half. About a year ago, the facility in Washtenaw county ended a policy in which youth had to wear the very kind of jumpsuits adults are forced to wear in prison. YAA’s director Heather Martin wanted to see them put towards justice in some way, and a few facilitator’s undertook the project of recreating or responding to this representation of the juvenile justice system. I have worked with so many different kids in these facilities, and have had so many incredible interactions and watched their inspiring creativity unfold. These kids are sharp, they are curious, they are thoughtful, they are questioning, they are funny and electric and complicated and desperately want to be seen, like every single one of us want to be. I do not know the full story or experience of every kid I work with, nor is it mine to ask for or tell. The concepts and generation of imagery for the jumpsuit came from my experiences working with them, getting to know them, and the themes I have seen recur in their artworks, and in the system that holds them. At the core of both of these are real human beings, full of conflict and creation. It was my goal with this project to represent at least a small part of all these layers I have seen and felt over the past year. My goal was create something humanizing and complex on a surface that is associated with a shameful stereotype. I wanted to create something that makes you see not just the jumpsuit, but the human being.
Thank You
Around the inauguration of Donald Trump, the image of The Rape of Sabine Women kept coming into my mind. Watching a man who is such a brazen sexist and misogynist, who has been accused of sexual assault by 18 women, become president in 2017 felt something akin to an entire town of women being abducted and violated. Though this is not a story from Roman mythology, and we’re talking about an entire country. Over the past year, we have all watched powerful men be exposed and punished (to a degree) for their harassment and abuse of women, and I wondered if this was finally “the moment.” Being inundated with news stories about the latest powerful abusive man, the latest public reaction to the victims and their stories, naturally made me and probably every other woman in this country revisit darker corners of our mind we would prefer to erase. Experiences and traumas that inevitably alter you. For myself and every woman or non-binary person, the status quo reaction to these experiences is some variation of: “It could have been worse. You should be thankful.” Thankful? To be a woman or non-male person is to constantly be fighting for your humanity, while under the expectation to be gracious and forgiving of everyone, most especially to those who have already degraded, abused, violated you. There is a cultural norm for women to expect and accept some degree of abuse at the hands of men, and that expectation has not changed in hundreds of years. It is why The Rape of Sabine Women was originally sculpted by Italian artist Giambologna in 1582 and is still relevant to this day. It is why man after man after man across industries have been harassers, abusers, rampant sexists for decades and are only now being overthrown. It is why we have a misogynist abuser in place of the 45th President of The United States.