Political Art

During the Bush administration I would wake up and my first thought was that we were still bombing people in Iraq.  Our country was in the grip of fear and censorship like I had never seen before.  It made me feel crazy.

I grew up reading the "Dick and Jane" primers.  The people who started and promoted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - mostly men of my generation -  believed in the world in those books. In the land of Dick and Jane, everyone knew their place: white people at the top and men over women. The cruelty of our national leaders led to disastrous consequences for thousands of people, and to torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

For years I felt alone being so angry all the time; in Santa Barbara it seemed people of privilege had taken up Bush's mantra: "I've got mine, why should I care about you." 

Images of lynchings kept coming to me during this time.  I drew dozens of pictures of men being lynched. The imagery also stood for what was happening to young people in our military: more soldiers were killing themselves than were killed in battle. In 2010 the Veterans Administration said that on average they lose 18 veterans a day to suicide.

And we brought the war home: even today we hold more people in our prisons than any nation on earth, and the death rate from suicide in prisons is staggering.

Making these dark images helped me carry the pain I felt, and showing them at a gallery in Kansas for "The Prison Project" with Marianne Evans-Lombe created a dialogue that helped with my grief and rage.

Dick and Jane are silhouettes cut from black paper; I used bleach on black cloth to make the hanging figures.