Strange Fruit (2018-2020) acrylic mix-media on wood
I started sketching this idea during the time of the Charleston ‘Unite the Right’ rallies in 2018. The one where the phrase “Tiki torch whites” came from.
During the event a woman was purposefully run over and killed when an angry racist drove into a crowd of anti-racist protestors. A week or so later a personal friend of mine narrowly dodged a similar incident at a follow up protest in Los Angeles. It was becoming a trend.
I grew up around a lot of Southerners. Having been imbibed with the stories of yonder years I was not ignorant to the significance of Charleston, South Carolina. A city that once was an international market place of human “chattel”. Thousands of people passed in suffering over the lands of Charleston and under the subsequent Jim Crowe era politics that followed the supposed “freedom” of Black Americans.
When I was young I took a tour of Georgia with my friend and her family, where they were originally from. We toured many major civil rights monuments but what stuck out the most to me was our plantation trip. We arrived and I discovered two groups of tourists…the White ones and the Black ones. The White group was all lined up to see inside the plantation, maintained to it’s full glory of Southern hospitality and faunal beauty.
The second group, the mostly Black group with the exception of myself, were there to see the remnants of the ‘slave quarters’ just offside the property, still hidden away. We never went inside the big house, nor wanted to. There were two tour guides, two very different tours and little to no crossover amongst the patrons. Absolutely bizarre but this is America.
Some people want things to go back to the way things were. The romanticization of the near past is a sign of this stubbornness to change. Sure you might miss Big Band or Elvis and Poodle skirts and Hippies and all that. For many Americans though it’s hard not to think of Emmet Till or Ruby Bridges, the Birmingham bombing or the assassinations’ of MLK and Malcom X along with any other radical of the time.…two different worlds of memory and experience.
The above photo was taken in 1930, only about 2-3 generations away from our current population. These are the grandparents of our modern society. So in 2018 when the rallies and counter protesting began, it was easy to see that grandma and grandpa made sure to keep the old traditions alive. With David Duke coming into power over the KKK the reformation of racism began.
No more were the obvious stereotypes of hillbilly Bobby with his missing teeth, Bobby is now Robert who runs your local bank. Klan members were encouraged to blend in with society and infiltrate as many positions of power as they could. They were also encouraged to remove their children from the public school systems opting for wide-spread race purity home schooling curriculum.
People did not become less racist, they just took it underground to wait for their moment. In 2018 it arrived and they literally busted out Tiki Torches in celebration. A burning cross would have been too obvious. This was the spark that finally set the house on fire. Many many incidents of small scale resistance had occurred in the past but it had not been since the 60s that white people felt comfortable doing the march for the race thing so that left many understandably concerned.
As I couldn’t be on the ground and have no real discernable power individually all I could do to process the hole of livestreams and Telegram groups I was seeped in was to paint. When things are emotional and I need to make sense of it that’s all I can do. I felt so much fear. Not as much as the ones carrying the torches though.
When you listen to what they’re saying, what their reasons for their actions are, they are almost entirely rooted in fear. Fear of losing their security, their power, their culture. With Trump being president at the time the anti-Mexican rhetoric was the highest I’d ever seen it nationally. The combination of hate towards these two groups led to the creation of ‘Strange Fruits’.
Clearly referencing the prophetic wisdom of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit“, and later Nina Simone, the idea of the lynching tree concept is rooted in my head. During the Obama campaign and presidency the amount of effigies hanging from trees were shocking. That polarization of going from Obama to Trump gassed up those same racists who hung little Obama-crows from their front lawns claiming first amendment rights. With Trump though, they set forth multiple targets.
I wanted to depict what I felt all these Tiki Torch whites feared the most. Karma.
They fear Mexico will somehow take over their country leaving waste to their institutions. Their greatest soldiers like Richard Spencer and Southern Confederate heirs lynched by mythic Antifa. The red hats of Trump supporters lay strewn in the overgrown bush-akin to Klan hoods or brown shirts. Across the border of the board I inked the memorized, albeit abridged line:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Declaration of Independence
“Unrest at the Empty Police Station” (2020) ink on watercolor paper
When I made the crying Rittenhouse portrait it was a very quick procedure. As I’d been following the Kenosha unrest and the national ripple effect of the death of George Floyd, Rittenhouse had become the ultimate symbol of ‘left’ vs ‘right’ ideology. The painting happened naturally.
It may seem a little tacky or even unethical to paint a crying child, but then I believe it is unethical to groom a child for civil war. To each their own. His big shiny tears of ‘not guilty’ were expected by essentially everyone. The right-wing sphere treated him like a demi-god and quickly bolstered his narrative of justice served. The protester he killed became another martyr to the cause.
The celebration of his actions were used as a tool by multiple groups to garner sympathy against, for, with whatever. People were trippin’ and the country was divided in a polarizing way. Kinda’ like OJ back in the day, this was our white Bronco.
Rittenhouse has since gone on to pretty prolific fame for a young gunslinger, currently taking a crack at state level politics. Of course he would, that makes sense in this society. No cap-as the kids say.
So when I saw that glistening teen bawling for his legal innocence I could feel what was to come…which sadly did. It was political then and it’s literally political now.
In his young adulthood Rittenhouse has gone onto start a large scale non-profit gun lobby in Texas. They’re making quite a splash. Regardless of how everyone feels about the gritty details, those sparkling tears have gone on to sow quite the garden. His crying will live forever in my memory.
“Fascist Chicken”
“So currently in my ‘home’ country we’re having a grand time exploring our new found American styled patriotism in true backwoods fashion. What was initially hailed as a ‘trucker protest against border mandates’ has turned into one large scale game of fascist chicken (who will strike first?) each side calling the other ‘Nazis’. The irony is that the lion’s share of Canada’s third Reich sympathizers are on both sides. So really, neither of them wants to kick shit off because to a large extent they are all “brothers in arms”.
Immersing myself in it I understand that maybe around 50%+ of the non-organizing supporters aren’t inherently full out racist or even involved really. Some are caught up in the party of it all. However, those at the top, Pat King and the organizers from Action4Canada (and many many others, shout-out Librti) associate with open 3 percenters, Odin and friends, waving a sea of Gadsden flags littering the visual field of nearly every available shot. The people on the ground are responding physical commands from Pat King who I really encourage people to look into at more than a surface level. Funds are being backed by the US. We have been trading/harboring militia members back and forth over the border for years. Now it’s kicking off and we watch aimlessly as essentially a biker siege was allowed to set up occupation in our nations capitol. Apparently they’ve now set up saunas to shvitz it out after pick-up hockey on Parliament.
As someone who has lived with a lot of Indigenous and ‘minority’ peoples in North America by day two the obvious was occurring. My running line has become “you wanna clear this shit? Put two elders on lawn chairs up front and the military will have this placed cleared in a jiffy”. The difference in treatment is obvious, hurtful and confirming.
There is now some indigenous involvement at the ground, but again it is very complicated. I encourage you to focus on Indigenous voices at this time and support APTN and other native journalists if you want to actually get some news and perspective on our 150 year old British outpost problems.”
Doga-Feb 8th, 2022
“Fascist Chicken” was in response to the 2022 Ottawa trucker occupation. I collected as much data as possible but due to life and the cacophony of a situation, only in 2024 have I had the bandwidth to process it all. As has the government, as of May 13th 2024, Pat King has begun to stand trial for his part in the overall movement. As of writing this it is day one of his trial, who knows where it goes.
Uncategorized
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“Blind Justice” (2017-2018) acrylic on found particle board
Hoodrat Anthropology 