New work: "Denier"

You know that feeling when you take the last step on the stairs, and it turns out there is no step and your foot comes down extra hard? That unexpected jolt, tinged with chagrin? Now imagine the missing step was a friendship you thought you could rely on: how much worse would that feel?

I’d felt that way about My Fellow Americans in general, and certain people in particular, over the past three years. Even my past seems to have been overwritten by these… interesting times in which we live.

Of course, I’ve picked up the fragments of this trust and rebuilt what I could, in a kintsugi kind of way. I can’t live with unrelenting suspicion of everyone I meet for the rest of my life. I wonder if all of us are in denial, but for very different reasons. I consider this new collage, “Denier,” a warning to myself as well as others.

Speaking of broken trust, one of my previous works has been accepted to the upcoming exhibit “Fracture” at the Kirkland Arts Center. I appreciate that I’m not the only person thinking about cracks in what we used to think was stable.

Art exhibit: "Tourist" in Jersey

If I can’t travel at the moment, at least my artwork is getting out and about! Later this month, you can see “Tourist” in New Jersey — at the Long Beach Island Foundation of Arts & Sciences.

In Loveladies, New Jersey, my collage will be shown in the “Works on Paper” exhibit. Dr. Louis Marchesano of the Philadelphia Museum of Art selected 68 pieces out of more than a thousand submissions: drawings and paintings, prints, paper constructions and more.

The month-long exhibit opens May 24th, right before Memorial Day, which sounds like the perfect weekend-at-the-shore to me. When you go to the exhibit, remember to tag me on Instagram or Facebook so I can share your photos!

Artwork purchase: and the new owner is...

I can give my crossed fingers a rest now: “Relatively Progressive” now belongs to the city of Shoreline!

The city will add my collage to its permanent art collection! In addition to my work centering the civil rights leader Edwin Pratt, Shoreline acquired two other pieces from the “Living the Dream” exhibit: Kemba Opio’s “Sunday Living”…

… and “A Brighter Tomorrow” by Vincent Keele.

Vincent Keele with Sarah Haycox, who helped name a Shoreline early education center after Edwin Pratt

I’m so thrilled to have created a collage that speaks to the African American presence in Shoreline, as well as the city’s present-day reckoning with its past. Public art coordinator and curator David Francis and I have had some illuminating conversations in that regard. And I’m grateful to the Black Heritage Society of Washington, which holds the original image of Edwin Pratt I used in “Relatively Progressive.”