Matched with each graduating senior’s personality, these quotes and portraits were graduating gifts for 3 seniors that I spent all 4 years of their high school careers with. Amazing humans with amazing journeys!
Category: MB
Independence Day
This collage combines an image from a liberal newspaper with painting and stamp art – I was recovering from wrist surgeries and couldn’t draw but still wanted to create, so this year my technique was a bit more… rough. The break in the rock is accidental, but maybe the symbolism works given that my arm was broken when I created it, and the piece is speaking about our broken country.
Women’s Studies
This lithograph during my college years represents my emerging understanding of the limits of being a woman in a world that values women and men differently.
WWJT (What Would Jesus Think)
This one’s for you, Trump, and anyone who still believes in you. You cannot be a Christian and a white supremacist at the same time. Your hypocrisy is no less dangerous, disgraceful, and disgusting than these guys – these KKK members, so many claiming to be “Christian” white supremacists – you cannot claim Jesus, a brown Jew, is your savior. Come talk to me – I’ve got a bible (or a Torah) (or a Quran) (or a history book) for you.
African Likeness
Traveling for 7 weeks in Africa for a low quality reality TV show, I found a disappointing lack of likeness to my African American students. I thought I would feel a connection to their ancestry. Towards the end of the trip, we visited a refugee camp with thousands of people from West-Central Africa, and everywhere I looked, I saw my students’ features. When I brought this up in conversation, I learned that most of the slaves kidnapped to the United States were from the regions that are present in that camp. The woman in this drawing was the spitting image of one of my students, Camilla. It was difficult to look into the eyes of refugees who were born, raised, and will die in these decades old camps, and see the spitting images of my students back home, and to witness the lasting impacts of slavery not just on race relations in the Unted States as we struggle to make reparations, but also in Africa, where colonialism and imperialism devastated existing cultures.
Native American Portrait Study
As Paul Papadonis, my high school art teacher, was teaching us how to draw portraits, I was becoming more and more fascinated with the people who were here before white settlers came and decimated their traditions, culture, and respect for the earth. I started using his lessons to copy portraits of Native Americans as I learned about new mediums at the same time. This one was completed with a stiff bristled paint brush and sticky brown printmaking ink. I wish I could find the original image that I plagiarized so I can give it credit for the composition!