The Black Plague
66.5” x 63.5”

Black jeans, zippers, metal jeans parts, painted, dyed, bleached, quilted, machine stitched.

Making art has always been my way of dealing with a crisis.
I started working on The Black Plague the day after George Floyd was murdered, May 26, 2020, fueled by my continued outrage and anger with another police murder of a black person.
I had been saving worn black jeans to use in my artwork and my first reaction was to pour bleach over the entire collection. I then spontaneously deconstructed the forms and abstractly machine stitched sections together, and because my artwork is experimental and not planned ahead, I let the work organically evolve. Researching what I already knew to be true, I found the appalling magnitude of this crisis to be shocking and ugly. I painted the name, age, city of murder, and year of each person’s death, and in a few areas transcribed the surreal stories of death, fully aware that the painted names on this work are a fraction of the true total.