City of Fruit

CITY OF FRUIT

ARTIST STATEMENT

I believe art should stand at the center of the causes and movements that shape our lives. It can reach emotion in ways facts alone cannot, leaving something with the viewer that can be carried forward, nurtured, and transformed into change.

City of Fruit was born from the twelve children I have known who were killed by gun violence, and from the thousands I never knew. It comes from bodies I have seen in the street, the person I witnessed being shot when I was eleven, guns pointed in my face, gunshots heard too often, and the grief of families forced to live with an absence that should never have existed.

The work is also about the roots of America. From its “entrance” to its “cemetery,” City of Fruit asks us to consider what has been planted in this country and what continues to grow from those roots. Beneath the mythology of “rockets’ red glare” and “bombs bursting in air” exists another procession: lives continually lost to violence, with no place considered sacred or off limits.

I created City of Fruit out of grief, love, exhaustion, and the refusal to look away. My paintbrush must keep moving for those who no longer can. The work asks us to see, to speak, to confront what is broken, to pull up the roots, plant anew, and choose love.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

City of Fruit was created was created for the non-profit, "Art Is My Weapon," in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The main components of the work are created from various decommissioned gun parts. At it's core is a lifetime of witnessing what gun violence takes from people, families, and communities. After knowing numerous children who were murdered by guns, witnessing people shot, seeing the violence inflicted upon Black people by police, hearing gunfire become an all-too-familiar part of community life, and watching mass shootings and individual killings repeatedly enter and disappear from the news cycle, I wanted to create something that made the violence impossible to experience as merely another statistic. The work asks us to see the blood, the absence, the grief, and the human beings behind the numbers.

At the center is the idea that gun violence in America is not simply a series of disconnected tragedies. It grows from roots. The United States was formed through conquest, war, racial violence, forced displacement, enslavement, and the gun. Those roots were never fully uprooted. When a society fails to confront what was planted at its foundation, those roots remain alive beneath the surface, continuing to feed what grows above them. Throughout, symbolic blood flows along the base of the work and into those damaged roots, creating a cycle in which violence produces grief, grief remains unresolved, and violence is allowed to feed again.

The city itself represents the institutions and spaces in which we expect to find safety, possibility, sanctuary, and community, yet gun violence respects none of those boundaries. The SCHOOL confronts the disturbing normalization of active-shooter drills alongside preparations for natural disasters. PLACES OF WORSHIP recall sanctuaries such as Emanuel AME Church, First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, and Tree of Life synagogue, reminding us that even spaces considered sacred are not beyond the reach of the gun. At the center stands the TREEE OBELISK, the trunk of this larger system of violence, extending its metaphorical roots and vines throughout the city.

The two ends of the work reveal different stages of the same cycle. At the ENTRANCE VIEW, fifty-seven shell casings memorialize the lives lost in the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas shooting. At the opposite CEMETARY VIEW, the landscape has become darker, deteriorated, and more ominous. Bullet casings rise from the surface like headstones. What enters the city as violence eventually becomes its cemetery.

Politics is embedded within this landscape as well. In a miniature movie theater, Greed in Tweed indicts political self-interest and the recurring failure to meaningfully address gun deaths, even after children are murdered in their classrooms. Across headstone-like structures appears my poem Tragedy of a Wanderer (A Bullet's Soliloquy), which gives the bullet a voice as a perpetual traveler searching for a human body to become its final home. Its arrival does not end with one life. A family, a neighborhood, and a community absorb the impact.

Ultimately, City of Fruit asks us to look beneath the shooting itself. It asks what created the soil in which this violence continues to grow, what we have normalized, what we refuse to confront, and what we continue to feed through inaction. I created the work as witness, memorial, accusation, and act of love. If these roots continue producing the same bitter fruit, then we must be willing to dig beneath the surface, pull up what is broken, and plant something new.

To see. To speak. To fix what is broken. To pull up the roots and plant anew. To love.