He has spent the last decade or so thinking about the land as a witness to history and politics. Boundaries shift, places are named and renamed, and maps are redrawn. Land is bought, sold, worked, exhausted, and fought over. It remembers everything and the events that unfold at a particular site become part of its permanent record, even if that record is unseen and mute.
I lost my Dad suddenly this year. During the intermission of Wicked on Broadway, I saw his name pop up on my phone. "Hey Daddy, I'm at a play right now --" His sister-in-law stopped me before I could finish. "I have some really bad news," she said. "Your Dad died." A relative who recently got into painting sent me a lifelike painting of my Dad and it sits on my mantle.
During the summer of 2020, when protests convulsed cities around the world, one of the most striking scenes took place outside a library in a wealthy Maryland suburb. Eight days after George Floyd was killed, hundreds of white people-masked yet packed together-assembled in Bethesda with banners that read I can't breathe. Then they thrust their hands to the sky and prayed, vowing to renounce the "white privilege" that marked them like original sin.
