“It is more arduous to honor the memory of anonymous beings than that of the renowned. The construction of history is consecrated to the memory of the nameless.”

“I thought if we could place frames among the landscape, it would help to focus the mind on to what is inside that frame: many people look but only a few see and feel its very soul.” - Ashley Jackson

No. 20 (Yellow Expanse) by Mark Rothko, owned (and later sold privately) by Bunny Mellon. 

“A new owner would be free either to preserve or raze the historic building”

“Ghosthymn (after the Raft),” 2019-21, during its creation. 

It references “The Raft of the Medusa” by Théodore Géricault but also “levels of precarity exposed by the pandemic and the embodied anxiety during those early months.”

by Charles Wright

It’s Saturday afternoon at the edge of the world. White pages lift in the wind and fall. Dust threads, cut loose, float up and fall. Something’s off-key in my mind. Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.

It’s hot, and the wind blows on what I have had to say. I’m dancing a little dance. The crows pick up a thermal that angles away from the sea. I’m singing a little song. Whatever it is, it bothers me all the time.

"A celebration of the art of baking bread and the great bakers of New York City by students at Parsons School of Design who made this book." This book started as a student publication produced over three months in 1973 and was produced as a yearbook for the school that "was representative of student interests and values without being strictly autobiographical."

Island by Takashi Kuribayashi, 2014

​World map made by water plants that inhabit floating in the pond.

Water plants is growing as time goes on, it will change the shape of the world map.

This painting depicts the apartment of Fred Hampton, an African American activist and the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Kerry James Marshall captures Hampton asleep in bed just before he was shot and killed in an early morning raid by officers from the Chicago Police Department on December 4, 1969. 

The painting—at its very core—epitomizes darkness. Composed of shades of black acrylic paint on black fiberglass, the painting is at first nearly indecipherable, revealing itself as your eyes slowly adjust. Asleep in bed, Hampton is depicted as a near invisible man... Hampton’s fiancée and fellow Black Panther, Akua Njeri, pregnant with their first child, has propped herself up in bed, her head turned as if listening. 

Does she hear police officers collecting outside their door? Is this the moment before the first shots were fired? 

With Black Painting, Marshall positions himself as both artist and archivist, using blackness as both medium and subject matter. The raid, which produced no police indictments, was one of the most controversial events to take place during the Civil Rights Movement.

The Redemption by Tawny Chatmon

“In the United States and abroad, the hair types and styles that are distinctively akin to Black people and culture continue to be policed and labeled as unkempt, unruly, unattractive, and unprofessional. While we proudly celebrate and adorn these styles with beads, barrettes, and other accessories within our cultural norms, they continue to be labeled unacceptable...