Our New Shape 8

This series of works is about how we, as people who care about freedom and justice, showed up in the new, historic moment that was January 2021 . For the four previous years, we were in a dysfunctional relationship with our government, a toxic relationship that caused a significant amount of pain and death. COVID has disproportionately impacted communities of color, and that is largely due to the failures of the Trump administration. Additionally, the Trump era unleashed the normalization of white supremacy in a brutal way that rolled back much progress that had been made on racial justice.

In 2021, a new administration was elected by the people, thanks to the outstanding leadership and civic engagement work of Black women and women of color. This new body of work was about my belief that it was time to adopt a new shape - a new posture in which we can towards our goals while recognizing that we have a different kind of opponent.

My inquiry was: What is the new shape that we take on at a time of increased relief coming to our communities, when we finally have a government that cares about people, an administration that is successfully rolling out the vaccine. These portraits served as an inquiry about our new shape and what that might look like.