Artist Statement
I explore social issues through a community-based art practice to reveal stories that emerge from conversations about social, spatial, and economic disparities.
Your Move Your Choice consists of a large woodcut print, laser printed postcards, and letterpress prints inspired by issues contributing to why Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The woodcut assemblage, bold and chaotic, illustrates how restrictive covenants have targeted African Americans and forcefully limited them to where they can live. The subject of this piece is Zeddie Hyler, a postal worker who needed his white friend to initially buy the land property in Wauwatosa because he was unable to legally purchase it in 1955. Shifting from a map to an interior domestic space, postcards are hung in a manner that would be found around a cozy fireplace inside an ideal home. The cheap curtain tie backs that hold the postcards reference colonization and contrast the different journeys of wealth and home ownership among blacks and whites.
Please take a postcard and hang it on your refrigerator or mail it to start a conversation that can acknowledge the truth of the past.
