CHRONICLES
The series “Chronicles: Victims and Warriors” was first inspired by my new urban surroundings and by the politics of the 1990s. Having left Texas for the first time for graduate school, I ended up in New York City. This required a lot of adjustments for me, but the fundamental shift also provided tremendous - and novel - visual and intellectual richness. I was completely fascinated by the look of the city and its influences on the interactions of its people. In a city with the population density of New York, people must constantly jockey for position - both literally/physically and abstractly. In these sorts of interactions, there is often a winner and a loser. Personally, I found that I had to shift how I interacted with people in order to be taken seriously (and my southern accent didn’t help). I was very aware of feeling like an outsider, but this also made it easier for me to be an observer, which directly fed my art and my science.
I have recently returned to and built on this series, inspired by renewed social unrest that built up during quarantine and exploded with the murder of George Floyd. I felt destroyed when I realized how little had changed since the beating of Rodney King, which was my brutal introduction to the treatment of black people by police. And I was also chastened by the realization that I had abandoned the use of my artistic voice to promote social change for the previous quarter century. I have now promised myself that even once the news loses focus on these issue, I will not.