How Did We All Get Here?

This piece is small - 8.25" wide by 12.25" tall by 1.25" deep. I made it for the All In show at Bear and Bird Gallery on Jay St in Schenectady in January 2026. I really love this piece for many reasons. One reason is that it reflects the way I feel about my home. Another reason is that I used the process of making it to work out feelings and ideas for a much larger piece I am creating that will be on exhibit in October 2026 ( Family+Tree+House ).

As a small child I was given a Colorforms dollhouse, and although I couldn't tell you what it looked like, I clearly remember that I found it absolutely thrilling. There was something about the spatial trick of a flat surface looking like a three dimensional space that gave me the excited feeling of discovering the answer to a mystery. That is definitely the feeling I was chasing working on this piece! The piece is also a celebration of the feeling that our loved ones (both living and in spirit) and our ancestors are present in our home. It feels happy and it feels good, despite all the repairs the house itself needs.

There are several threads of story woven into this piece. One of them—it's not a ghost story, it's a visitation story—happened during the pandemic. I woke in the night and felt a presence in the room that radiated so much love it was palpable, and I could sense it moving between myself, and my husband sleeping beside me, and our daughter asleep on the guest mattress she had dragged into our room, and our little dog asleep at the foot of the bed, and back again in a slow and comforting flow. It was one of the happiest, most comforting and beautiful feelings I have ever had and I am very grateful for the experience. That is one thread. Another is that my husband and I have a very happy marriage, and yet another is that we have lost people who we dearly love.

The stories of our immediate families and distant ancestors are also important threads in this piece. Beginning about 500 years ago, my husband's ancestors were kidnapped from the African continent and forced into enslavement in Jamaica for the next 300 years. Over the last 400 years, from each of our families' many branches, several someones, at one point or another, arrived on North American soil—some by force, some escaping war, some in the hope for a better life—and by better life I mean enough food to go around, education for the children, the hope of a stable job and owning a home, and that soldiers wouldn't kick down your door and drag you away. The place that seemed safer than the ones our families came from was stolen by trickery and violence from its rightful inhabitants, it's wealth built by cruelty and the suffering of enslaved people.

The exploitation and brutal treatment of the poor, and of refugees, migrants and immigrants to this country is nothing new, and that is shameful. Lack of health care and unhealthy and dangerous living and working conditions shortened many lives during the colonial era and industrial revolution. Normalizing substandard and inhumane treatment of refugees, migrants and immigrants continues to this day, and has become an especially cruel agenda under the current administration, combining racist and xenophobic policy to deadly effect.

Ultimately this piece is an invitation for the viewer to consider how their own family came to be here, in this place, all together. For those of us with the privilege of not being targeted by ICE, protected by skin color or citizenship or both, it may serve as a reminder that for most of us hunger, the fear of a knock on the door, having to leave home, and the loneliness of being "foreign" are not that many generations behind us. It might make us aware of how those around us are being treated. It might lead us to understand that the same forces that make citizens of one country into refugees in another are at work all over the world, now as then. How then, we can ask ourselves, will we help each other?