Works for Imaginary Book Covers: America's Non-Native Native Americans - Exclusion and Marginalisation - Limited Edition 1 of 15 Artwork

I wanted the cover of this Imaginary Book to reflect the dignity of the peoples that they still had before being herded into reservations by the incomers, foreign to this land, and excluded from American life. However, I also wanted to show the devastation that had taken place as the surviving people of two and half centuries of genocide had decimated the peoples and exclusion from the life that all other Americans enjoyed and enjoy has left them a people within a country without a country. This is captured in the thumbnail on the spine in a photograph by Edward S Carter whose work, held in a collection in the Library of Congress, deserves to be better know. The situation with regard to the native population of this country remains, and will remain, the greatest injustice, yes, even greater than slavery, that America has perpetrated and, at some point in the future, America will grant these fellow Americans full rights and some kind of restitution. For Native Americans it cannot come soon enough. But come it will. The work either stands on its own or it does not. I think, though, there is room here to talk of the political in art and of my intentions towards the work. As I develop as an artist, I realise that should I not bring my passions to my works they will lack conviction. They will fail to fully engage the viewer. I think there is a place for the political in Fine Art but it should have a timeless quality such that the work endures centuries from now and still speaks as it needs to do now, if, and only if, it is effective in putting across that which it is trying to put across. For example, the use of the word genocide as spoken of above. One hopes that in time such instances of the massacres of whole peoples will have vanished from the planet but one can't say that it will. Whether Americans agree to the use of the word to describe the sheer extent and deliberateness with which they killed whole populations in the country to which they had come as outsiders is beside the point. Many nations still have the collective guilt that they have not come to terms with and are still in denial. An example is Turkey's mass killings of Armenians already referred to in a previous work. This action has been all too common throughout history. To take a single instance, the Romans wiped out an entire civilisation, that of Dacia, such that barely a trace of remains of it. In using the word, as I do there and here, I do not blame the successors of those responsible but issue a wakeup call to have those successors of the perpetrators of the deed accept that that action is what it can best be described as: genocide. My interest lies not so much in the tragic of the circumstance and having a sympathy with the survivors and offspring of the event, which indeed I feel, but more the recognition that a nation develops with time and, in accepting the misdeeds of the past, that nation grows. Part of the growth of that same nation is arrested until the recognition and acceptance is publicly stated and supported by the majority of the peoples of that nation. And that some form of physical manifestation of that recognition be made. I do not therefore think that any such nation carrying the burden of such guilt should feel ashamed. Nor do I ask them to admit guilt. No, quite the contrary. Instead my call in a work such as this is to say, "Look the event in the eye and as a body nation say, 'Yes, we did it. We accept that.' " That is all that is required. Should an individual nation wish to do more so be it. It is not required. But justice is.

Mixed Media:Vector on Cardboard

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:1

Size:27 W x 29 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.