2021-2020
The "Covid Diairies" series are works based on my journal entries during the past eight months and counting. In the series, mundane daily chores in isolation in my apartment collide with catastrophic world news.
In this piece, I grapple with my own racism and culpability as a white female artist who makes work about early American history. In the piece, there is a stain spreading on my studio wall (which is tacked with current newspaper headlines plus a photo of me in my childhood home papered with Americana wallpaper). It appears I have cut out drywall in increasing large fragments looking for the source of the stain. Underneath the white drywall is discovered the Americana wallpaper I grew up with. Perhaps hopeful, perhaps a warning of what we feed our children, behind the wallpaper, a bird is found nesting in the rotten beams that are insulated with old newspapers about Emmett Tills murder in 1955.