Remembering Tyshawn Collage

Remembering Tyshawn was created in response to the execution-style murder of a 9-year-old in Chicago's Auburn Gresham neighborhood in 2015 and that event's impact on the children of his school and the city of Chicago. I visited the child's school to present scholarship information three weeks after the boy's death. The school was filled with displays "in memory" of Tyshawn. As evidenced by some of the children's artwork, some were terrified to leave their homes to attend school. At the time, I was a new transfer student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Having won a full-ride scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to complete my bachelor's degree, I am familiar with the many obstacles involved when the less privileged work to earn degrees. When the news of Tyshawn broke, the city was shaken. The execution of a child in broad daylight in an alley after school was not an obstacle I had ever considered. I was moved to respond. The piece is made of newspaper mounted on foam board and tells a story of unequal opportunity and trauma in relation to existing power structures and poverty. The piece employs a didactic visual language filled with puzzles, mazes, and stock reports based on the location on the surface. The stock reports at the top flow blood red toward the uneven corrugated building with bars at the bottom. The newspaper reflects pieces of news from the time of Tyshawn's death incorporated into a conceptual landscape of perceptions of what some inner city kids go through just to get an elementary education.

Collage:Acrylic on Cardboard

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:30 W x 20 H x 0.1 D in

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