Say Their Names
Say Their Names
The Real Funhouse
by Catherine Peet
Mixed Media Assemblage
Why Can't We
All Get Along?
by
Claudia Barak Hershman
Acrylic, Collage Papers and Markers
on Tar Paper
”Hoping for better times when there is more harmony and less animosity to differences between people.”
-Claudia Barak Hershman
Stop the H8
by Craig Billings
The Takeover
by Daniel Cicchelli
Acrylic, Ink, and Paper on Canvas
Black Lives Matter,
Show Me Your Hands
by Deborah Marlowe Kashdan
Multi-Media Monoprint
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.
George Floyd
by
Mia Risberg
“I painted this after the murder of George Floyd. As most people I was shocked by what happened. It was difficult for me to concentrate on my studio work. I decided to paint this image which represents George Floyd but really could be any other victim of police violence and injustice. It feels like a personal piece. I was thinking about the grief that a family feels when something like this happens. As a mother though, I was mostly empathizing with the pain that a mother feels at the terrible loss of a child.”
-Mia Risberg
MA2ssA2cre on Winewood
by Mike Mosher
“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
Ever Vigilant
by
Sandra Cardew
Mixed Media Collage
Like so many of you, I’ve been struggling with how to respond to the brutal murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed. I’ve tried making work that speaks to this injustice since, for me, words alone can’t completely express the gravity of it all. At times it feels emotionally overwhelming...too large and gut wrenching a subject to grab hold of. The effort may in turn be more cathartic than communicative so I’ve tried to narrow my focus a little and hone in on what it must be like to raise and protect a black child in this racially charged environment. A recent NY Times article I read asked what it’s like being the mother of a black son? She responded, “the condition of black life if mourning.” For her mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality and she carried the strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black! My white liberal imagination is trying very hard to empathize and fully understand this, but I will never completely know or comprehend that level of fear. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO!
-Sandra Cardew