Visual Art

In March of 2013 I arrived in Worcester ready to immerse myself in the world of an early 19th century woman. I was interested in the notations she kept about weather and agricultural life. Anna Blackwood Howell was a white woman of means who inherited a farm and fisheries in New Jersey on the banks of the Delaware River across from Philadelphia when her husband died in 1818. She was 50 years old. The AAS holds fifteen of her diaries written in almanacs between 1819 and her death in 1855.

I came to AAS about 20 years ago when phone-cameras were nonexistent and many of the printed materials I looked at were too rare and delicate to put even near a copy machine. Using only what was allowed in the library; plain pencil, eraser, ruler—and I slowly filled many pages with careful records.This past summer, I found a few notebooks from that time and include a shot here.

Title: Granite Sofa
Date: 2010
Medium: Pink granite, 4000 pounds, 3 parts
Dimensions: 38" x 93" x 27" overall
Current Location: On loan to Martha Stewart, installed in the foyer of her summer home in Seal Harbor Maine

My project, CONTRABAND, visually explores how the industry of slavery laid the blueprint for drug crimes, gang culture, and mass incarceration in Black communities. This project draws from research at the American Antiquarian Society where I used ephemera and manuscripts to visualize the economics of the transatlantic slave trade. I am working to unpack historical connections visually; sometimes words fail me. CONTRABAND will be the culmination of this research and analysis in the form of large scale silkscreen prints, woodblock prints, and animation.

A Bird to overhear—audio-visual images: history, landscape, birds.

Bird song marks not only the change of season, but indicates ecological shifts in landscape and climate, as noted in the crucial observations gleaned by naturalists Rachel Carson (1907-1964) and Florence Merriam Bailey (1863-1948). Daily note taking brings an awareness to the world right outside one’s doorstep, gathering the nearby into community. Knowing and naming are firsts steps in making aware.

I have an affinity toward finding something surprising in the seemingly banal, rags. Something that seems so unimportant was filled with metaphor. I was at AAS looking for something important: fancy paper dolls, handwriting of the important feminist, and I found the biggest surprise in the call for rags at the back of a book or on a broadside. I was struck by the language that commodified by color:

I proposed the creation of chapbook inspired by a variety of works housed in the American Antiquarian Society library. The idea behind the original lengthy title, The Conjurer's Apprentice or The Legend of Yellow Mary: A Slave Girl's Tale of Survival by her Wit and Extraordinary Powers, as written by herself, refers to the oft-displayed vernacular and odd titles describing the content and introduction of 18th and 19th century chapbooks.

The month that I spent at AAS came at a pivotal time in my career as an artist. When I arrived at AAS, I was in my early thirties and experimenting with altering pages of books that I found in antique shops, flea markets, and dumpsters. Being allowed into the treasure trove that AAS represented was, for me, a nerd’s dream come true. Naturally, though, it was not an option to overprint, burn, or alter the precious books that I handled in the reading room, so being in residence pushed me to think about new ways to work with historical imagery and text.

As a 2020 Hearst Foundation Creative Artist Fellow, I completed research for the book The Making, an illustrated novel set in New England during the 1940s-1950s. In the book, two sisters, Bea and Millie Cogswell, must live by the rigid traditions of their aging grandmother - always performing as true ladies of the 1800s should.

I arrived at AAS in April 2015 ready to comb the archives for visual examples of spiritual and religious influences on American identity during the colonial period. What I didn’t realize until I got there is that spirituality and religiosity are ubiquitous in 17th and 18th century printed materials and ephemera. I immediately became confused about my topic and overwhelmed by the volume of materials in the archive.