Lee (Amerikkka) featured at SECAC 2022 in Baltimore.

At a panel discussing public art and systematic racism hosted by Jason Brown (UTenn, Knoxville), myself (St.Francis College), Rebecca Hackemann-Bahlman (Kansas State), Billy Friebele (Loyola) and Meredith Drum (remotely from Virginia Tech) presented and discussed with engaged participants, the current state of the monumental landscape.

I traced the Anna Pierrepont Series from its hyperlocal origins in plein-air drawings on paper mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

The series then turned its focus on erasure in pictorial essays and eventually to my current large scale studio works on paper documenting our singular moment of monumental reckoning.

I detailed my increased interest in plein-air works on the wear and inscriptions that emerged as lyrical tracery in numerous works on paper such as

pictures increasingly the absence of the monument to J. Marion Sims (plein-air) from 2018 that like the Sims absence, featured the bases of political and funerary monuments.

This practice enabled me to draw out the red 'AmeriKKKa' from the rest of the numerous markings on the Lee as part of the 2020 protests.

This orchestration enabled the word to speak to the legacy of violence celebrated by the Lee and in equestrian monuments in general.

Since the Lee and its inquisition in Amerikkka are no longer extant, the word testifies about the contemporary speaking back in grief and defiance to the legacy and persistence of injustice so embodied by the enormous and no longer extant Lee. The words 'Amerikkka' being lost along with it.

So what remains is my work on paper Lee(AmeriKKKa) as a totem.

Thanks to Jason, Rebecca, Meredith, Billy, our awesome colleagues at a provocative session and conference.