Blog / 2025 / Artistic Reckoning

If you make art for long enough and specifically art that addresses complex social issues, the work almost certainly won’t totally hold up over time.

I’m not referring to the personal evolution that artists undergo, wherein art made ten or fifteen years ago feels immature, fails to represent who they are today, or just generally feels like a mistake. When I say that the art doesn’t “hold up,” I mean in a wider cultural sense.

In my case, there’s one project in particular that’s been on my mind: Apple Pie.

These are portraits of mostly first and second generation Americans along with one Native American and one Black American, and each of the subjects’ likenesses has been combined with an American icon.

My goal with this series was to choose some of the most important and—by dint of systemic racism’s role in our culture—some of the whitest heroes of the US, and remake them in a way that reflects who we actually are as a nation, giving them what I called a “facelift” at that time. That said, because I think of portrait subjects as collaborators, the collection ended up evolving into something a little different. Besides the many white icons featured in the series, Apple Pie includes Ella Fitzgerald along with some nonhuman symbols like the American flag.

I started these paintings in 2007, when immigration was a prominent issue, because, for the first time ever, a Black man who was also a second generation American was running for the highest office in the land. As the child of a naturalized citizen myself, the GOP’s hateful rhetoric around immigration felt personal.

And Apple Pie was my response, because, despite my vested interest in questions of immigration, I recognized that I didn’t understand every kind of American experience and especially what it meant to be a person of color in the US. I reasoned that, if I didn’t get it, plenty of people in my largely white audience might not either.

So I decided to ask a number of people to share their experiences through me, both by helping me create what’s called an allegorical portrait and by writing a statement. Those texts are published on this site with each of the paintings in the online gallery for the project.

Still, despite all the care I took when designing this project, I didn’t get everything right, either at the time—as I explain in greater detail in my portion of the text underneath this totem pole painting for example—or as viewed from today’s perspective.

I will always be sorry for the hurt I have caused with this work. While at this point I don’t think it’s the right choice to take any of it down, I remain open to feedback on that decision.

And I continue to learn from my mistakes.

A few months ago, I announced a new project in a long post about a celebrity who hired me to paint his portrait twenty years ago. Specifically, I want to portray famous people from American history who should be more famous, but because of their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability they’ve never gotten proper recognition. I’m talking about figures that the Trump administration would like to erase from historical sites, government websites, and textbooks. And I want to present those paintings along with a short story from their lives—something that’s gripping enough that it makes you want to learn more about who these people are.

So far, I’ve made a couple of paintings that might be a part of the series and I’ve written texts to go with them—check out this video about Fannie Lou Hamer and this one about James Baldwin to hear those stories.

But I don’t feel right making this project on my own.

On my blog, I’ve asked for suggestions of historical figures to paint and many of you have sent me excellent recommendations, each one helping me feel more connected to these United States than the last. Thank you!

Behind the scenes, I’ve also been reaching out to potential institutional partners who could help turn this into a group project, bringing together many artists and writers to assert a version of American history that includes all of us.

There’s been some interest: one “this is cool but we can’t do it right now” and a couple of “we need to talk more about this as an institution and get back to you.” At the same time, the responses also tend to come with a reminder of the federal funding cuts to anything cultural that displeases the US’s own Dear Leader—as if I could forget.

Which is why I’m publishing my proposal to this blog.

Download the proposal PDF!

Please share this document with anyone in your circle who you think might be able to help facilitate a project like this.