Welcome Friend, Or, Act No. 579, 1956 La. Acts 1-6 (mandating that “all persons, firms and corporations are prohibited from … participating in, or permitting … any dancing,
games, sports … involving personal and social contact, in which participants or contestants are members of the white and negro races … and where public is invited or may attend … [such firms] shall provide separate seating
..sanitary, drinking water … for members of the white and negro races, and to mark such separate
accommodations …)
Acrylic, oilstick and colored pencil on canvas in two parts. From the Broken Laws series. 46 x 64 inches overall. 2024.
The Broken Laws series represents an on-going experiment in looking at the connections between language, the written word and formal imagery.
These pictures take as a starting point, the exact transcriptions of bigoted Louisiana state laws under Jim Crow-era repression to enumerate the ways in which bias formally embeds itself into civic life and the artist’s (myself) rejection of these rules through the plastic means of striking the language down. A binary accompaniment of an abstracted form is my own peace offering, acknowledging that while words do cause harm, art in its allure and ambiguity can nonetheless heal.
