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!
Home Sign
Having been kicked out of a Syrian refugee camp on a tiny island of Lesvos by a crazy German Greek who abused his young female volunteers and didn’t appreciate me standing up for them, I found myself far from home and ready to work in the refugee camps – the project I planned for dissolved. Rewind to my budding relationship with Home for All, where we determined through Eric’s tech support that the only thing standing in the way between TripAdvisor and them was a picture of their business with a sign in front. I called a volunteer from Home and told him about getting dragged out of the camp for causing too much of a scene (same ol’, same ol’) and feeling beaten down and useless, and he replied simply, “Just come Home.” I responded that first I would paint them a sign so they could finish their TripAdvisor profile. And, since then, a video with the sign went viral, and has been seen by millions – my most famous work yet!
Saint Paul
This one is for Abouna Paul Girguis and his Egyptian Coptic congregation. A day or so before I met the Copts volunteering in refugee camps in Athens, I spent the day with a Pakistani torture victim whose body was riddled with dents, holes, disfigurations and scars. He took the bandages off of his feet, revealing holes where nails had been driven in, and offered the bandages to me because I had blisters on my toes from inadequate sandals. A few weeks prior, he had been promised a new life with a group of people that would smuggle him out of Greece and then help him start his life over. However, the morning of the planned escape from Athens, they insisted he renounce Islam and become a Christian. His loyalty to his faith was more important than his freedom and security and safety, so homeless in Athens he would remain.
As I heard of another religious group coming to help refugees, I became protective of the refugees I was serving. I warned this new group, the Egyptian Coptics (“whatever THAT means,” I thought to myself), that I would bring them to the squat to help prepare the school, but only if they left religion out of it. We connected easily, and by the end of the meeting, were eating from each other’s plates and sipping from each other’s smoothies, but I still maintained my secular demands. Mina Sawires and Bobby Zaki returned to their apartment after our meeting and shared the bad news with their congregation, that while they would be allowed into the squat to help refugees, their connection into the squat (me) was completely anti-religion and had warned them sternly to keep all of their religious “baggage” out.
Something happened in my head and heart the night after our first meeting, and I was overcome with a feeling of protection. For the first time, I knew I wasn’t crazy for being on this trip. Unbeknownst to me, that night they started to feel that they were in Athens for a purpose besides the refuges – to offer me their love, and the protection that comes with that, and they prayed I would accept it. The next morning, I surprised myself as much as them when I asked at our meeting in the squat if they would like to open up the day with a prayer. From that moment on, unbeknownst to them, their presence guided me through the rest of the trip.
The last few days of the trip were filled with questions about God and suffering (really, if you want to test your faith in religion, go look at the conditions the refugees are living in). Minas never said he extended his stay to make sure I had all the support and protection that I needed while I was there on my own, but I’ll always wonder if that was part of the Plan. I simply was not going to survive my five weeks without something bigger than myself watching over me. The Copts became my connection to that big thing.
A year later, they remained a strong force in my life, as I wandered my way through trying to recover from the injuries to both body and spirit that that summer brought. They had no agenda to recruit me nor figure out if I’m a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist. They just, relentlessly, offer me love. This is what religion is supposed to be.
The Egyptian Copts are people of peace and love. In response to church bombings on Easter a few years ago, Abouna Paul wrote to me, “We love them still, and we forgive them.”