Say Their Names
Say Their Names
Another Finger for the Wound:
My Sister, My Daughter
by John Wood
Porcelain, 2015
This was created as part of a series in response to the poem "another finger for the wound" by Francine Harris. The title refers to an episode in the Bible about doubt and faith. Being faithful is difficult when people are murdered senselessly. Sandra Bland was killed in police custody in 2015 after a traffic stop in Texas.
“I grew up in Ann Arbor (Pioneer High '73), so felt compelled to record the shooting of Aura Rosser by a policeman in her Ann Arbor home in November of 2014 in a painting "Major Motion Picture Shot Here". We had been seeing so many phone videos of police atrocities (though not Aura's) that I conceived of it like a dramatic painted movie billboard from India or Africa. Her killing—"MA2ssA2cre on Winewood" street—is set in her front lawn rather than her kitchen, her boyfriend on the porch watching the result he did not intend by calling police.
The 4' x 7' artwork is painted in Politec Mural Acrylics on polyester fabric. The kitchen knife Aura was supposedly brandishing is hurled into the first "A2" (A-squared, as Ann Arbor likes to be called), and other letters of her or the city's name are skulls for O or prescription RX indicating her troubled mental state. Perhaps every police killing evokes the Third Reich's SS, no?
The painting was exhibited at the 2nd UM Social Justice Art Festival in 2017. Yet this is not my first piece inspired by the Black Lives movement. I was horrified by the 2012 execution by seven Saginaw Police officers (see YouTube) of Milton Hall who had panhandled pocket change from me a couple years before. My "Black Milton Matters" series of paintings and drawings was exhibited at Counter Culture in Saginaw in 2017, some of which you can see here.”
- Mike Mosher