Inheritance

Inheritance is an ongoing series of mixed-media paintings on modern American motherhood — on what one generation is asking the next to carry.

Each work layers realistic figurative painting of my young daughter over collaged newsprint and political documentation, wrapped in soft materials that fray, spill, or come undone: crochet, eyelet lace, ribbon, cheesecloth. The tenderness of a child is placed in the same frame as the policy conditions of her arrival. Neither is allowed to erase the other. These layers represent the anxieties that parents carry every day, constantly present at the backs of our minds. Necessary commodities - food, shelter, clothing - are represented in the lace, crochet, and other fabrics seen. Parenthood is a constant series of worries, but regardless, everything is made worth it by our focal points of each piece.

In Dandelion, she rises through headlines documenting the defunding of prisons and rehabilitation programs — a child insisting on becoming, whether or not the ground beneath her can hold it. In Targeted Innocence, her face turns away from a ProPublica report on aid programs that will cause hundreds of thousands of children to die, while a child's drawing of flora blooms over the news. In Still/born, her infant body meets an Amnesty International account of the harms unleashed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade — a painting that holds, simultaneously, my grief for pregnancies made impossibly harder and my joy at the daughter who is nevertheless here. In Milestones, her crawling body is set against Prison Policy Initiative reporting on the carceral state's refusal to let anyone move forward — even as we cheer her forward, every day.

This work is made from inside the daily labor of watching a child grow up in a country transforming into something we do not yet recognize. And though our worries may be carried within and around us every day, our children make the struggle worth it.